Can I shade ORMLite into my Jar via Maven and distribute that Jar?

Question

I have a little question about ORMLite and its license.

I've found this document. Is this the true license of ORMLite?

If I understand it correctly, I just need to copy the license into my final jar, for example in /third-party/ORMLite/license.txt

I want to include ORMLite as a dependency into my open-source project and I want to use the Maven-Shade-Plugin to copy all its classes into my Jar. Finally, I want to distribute that Jar for public download - am I allowed to do so, if I include their license file as stated above?

Answer 1

Yes, that is the true license of ORMLite, and yes, you can do so. ORMLite's license is known as a "permissive" or "copyfree" license, meaning it imposes no restriction on the license of your code.

Copying it into the final JAR would indeed work. Or you could include a file indicating the copying terms for all the code used in the project, which you might put at the top directory of your distribution, or in an "About box". If you use Firefox, go to about:license for an example. Yours would look something like:

This program is (c) 2016 by Annotated.

License notice for ORMLite [list the ORMLite files or directories here]:
Permission to use...
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS"...
The author may be contacted at...

Be warned that it's not always as simple as that. Some licenses require that you license your whole work under the same license, in order to preserve others' freedoms. This is called "copyleft". For a quick explanation of the license spectrum, see GitHub's Choose-a-License. For a thorough look at the ecosystem of FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) licenses, see the Free Software Foundation's list.