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With respect to my colleague Bart, a licence that "encourages" users to contribute back would not fail the desert island test: that is engaged when the licence requires such contribution or communication. The example Debian quote in the linked page refers to an author who says "you must hereby send me your changes"; note "must". A licence that asks the ...
4
Making your software available under free and open source terms means the legal terms under which you make your software available meet certain standards (namely, the FSF's four freedoms and the OSI's Open Source Definition). Those definitions allow commercial reuse/distribution, so any legal terms that don't allow commercial reuse will not fall within the ...
4
There are two aspects to this question.
First, there is the effect of using a third-party tool on copyrights. The nice thing is that the copyright license of tools don't affect the possible copyright licenses of the output. This also means, for example, that Microsoft has no say in how you license the documents you write with MS Word.
Secondly, there is ...
4
You have a dataset which you wish to release under an open licence. You also wish to encourage people who write software to work with this dataset to release their software under a copyleft licence. Firstly, good for you for wanting to free your data.
That said, you have a problem. The licence on software does not generally affect the licensing on the ...
4
We can both write a HelloWorld application in the same language and chances are that both programs will look very similar. This does not mean that, if I were to publish mine first, that your version would be derived from mine. Both are independent works, no matter how similar they look.
Copyright law and -judges also recognize the fact that as there become ...
3
According to a recent slashdot post
Bruce Perens has declared:
The "Coherent Open Source" plan asks creators of new work to place it under one of only three licenses: The Affero GPL 3, LGPL3, or Apache 2. These three were chosen because they are all compatible with each other, are all approved of by both OSI and FSF, and they provide a range of ...
3
If there is such a license, it would not be an open-source license. Such a license would likely fail the Desert Island Test
Can a group of people exercise their rights under the license, even if they have no way of communicating with you.
Besides that, a copyright license is not the best way to motivate people to contribute bug reports/feature requests/...
3
All free / open source software can be sold. If you're distributing GPL software then you have to make the source code available to those who receive it. If your code is merely running in a VBox instance then you won't be bound by VBox' license, though if you use other free software libraries make sure you follow their licenses too.
With VirtualBox the one ...
2
What you describe reads pretty much as a translation to another language with "only" the work necessary to adopt it to that without changing the principle logic or structure of the programme. Generally, that makes your work a derivative work of the original work and you are bound to its license. For a GPL-licensed source that means you will need to comply to ...
2
The MIT license does not require that you in some way reference the original project when you copy some code.
The MIT license does require that you copy the copyright and license text along with the code that you copy. Depending on how the copyright statement is formulated, this can become effectively a reference to the original project.
2
I recommend to avoid it.
If you download the package manually you can check that no License available in the whole package and no references to it. So for me, this is an Unlicensed case.
Also, you can check more information about the maintainer in the Github profile.
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The main reason why Creative Commons recommends against using CC licenses, including CC-BY, for software is probably license proliferation.
Another issue is that, even for an apparently simple license like CC-BY, it is not entirely clear how that license interacts with other licenses and where the incompatibilities lie.
For example, the legalcode contains ...
1
For clarity, it is easiest if you can put the third-party source code in a separate source file. Then you can put the copyright and license notices without any issue at the normal place (the top) in the file.
If you can't use a separate source file and both projects use the same license (or the third party code uses a dual license with the license of your ...
1
If you are referring to this project https://github.com/powershell/powershell, then the answers to your two questions are:
Licensing: That project is MIT licensed: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/master/LICENSE.txt. So far, there has never been any licensing issue with running MIT licensed software on any Linux to my knowledge.
Embrace... : ...
1
The requirements of copyright licenses only come into play when you provide the code to other legal entities (people or businesses), with the assumption that they get to decide what to do with it.
If the code doesn't leave your company, or if you only give the code to a hosting company with the explicit instruction to run it on a (virtual) server that you ...
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Using a piece of documentation in order to write your own program does not generally produce a derivative work. A derivative work would mean that you copied or transformed copyrightable portions of the source material in a manner that would require permission. Keep in mind that copyright only protects the particular expression of an idea. The idea itself is ...
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The GPL license on the library does not strictly imply that you must use the GPL license on the program. The GPL license requires that the rights that users get under the GPL license are extended to all code in the application, but that can also be achieved by using a GPL-compatible open-source license.
Additionally, the GPL license requires that you ...
1
There're several different JRE available with different licenses. Two most prominent are:
OpenJDK is open-source (GPL). You can use it without having to pay for it.
Oracle JRE use different license (https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/oracle-javase-license.html). I am not a lawyer, but as far as I understand, it is still free for usage.
As for JDK, ...
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