Every time I try to read or learn about licensing, it ends in a massive headache for me. Hence, I'm asking here, hoping to finally get some peace of mind about this.
Say I have a little program I'm working on. I put it on GitHub and license it under MIT. That is, I create a LICENSE with the legal text and put it in the project root. Now the coding begins.
- Working with mp3s is complicated --> com.mpatric.mp3agic (MIT)
- Java's layout managers are unusable --> com.miglayout.miglayout-swing (BSD 3-clause (or GPL))
- Swing looks bad --> com.formdev.flatlaf (Apache 2.0)
As stated before, my code is on GitHub and I'd like to relase the program as a pre-built package there.
Now what?
Can I (or a maven plugin) just make a file, say THIRD_PARTY, put the artifacts and their licenses there, add the file on GitHub, package it with the program, and everything is fine?
Or do I have to make sure that I use a license for my program that works (i.e. that is "compatible") with all of my dependencies? If so, what would that license be?
Thank you in advance.
EDIT
To clarify, I only use the project as dependencies, i.e. in my pom.xml there's a part that says
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.mpatric</groupId>
<artifactId>mp3agic</artifactId>
<version>x.x.x</version>
</dependency>
...
</dependencies>
The question is about what to do now, how to do it might be a seperate question depending on the what. Perhaps the question is better phrased as such:
If my project (licensed under A) depends on libraries/artifacts (licensed under B, C, D etc.),
a) do the dependencies influence the choice for the license of my project
b) is distributing something like a THIRD_PARTY file containing info on which dependency uses what license along the source and binaries all I need to do here?
EDIT 2
Turns out that the maven-notice-plugin
seems to be for NOTICES only which doesn't seem like something I want right now.
I then tried both the license-maven-plugin
and the attribution-maven-plugin
They both, in essence, generate files saying "this project (link) uses this license (link)". This is closer to what I want, but looking at other program's THIRD_PARTY files or equivalent thereof, they include the EXACT text of the project's LICENSE file. For example, the mp3agic section would read
Copyright (c) 2006-2013 Michael Patricios http://github.com/mpatric/mp3agic
and not
Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>
,
which would be my understanding of the phrase "this permission notice shall be included". Seems like I have to download the licenses myself and put them in a directory. A minute of work for each dependency, but that's fine.