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When talking about BSD license, you have to be aware that there is not one, but actually four different BSD licenses. The most basic is the zero-clause BSD license which is a public domain license which doesn't even require attribution:
Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.
...
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I cannot say whether this would be considered open source, but it would not be free software. Free software confers, amongst other things, the right to modify the software; the FSF refer to this as freedom one. It imposes, and allows of, no constraint in the application of this right; constraints on the four freedoms are generally allowed only when they ...
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You just include the licence in your software, no registration needed. Your software is always copyright protected, you state the terms of use through a licence.
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I posted an answer to the announcement post that pretty much sums up why part of this - the exception - is a bad idea:
You're essentially creating a crayon license.
If you modify the terms of an existing license, you create what is known as a crayon license. Those are a problem - see "How can a “crayon” license be a problem?" for the reasons why.
...
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You don't "obtain" a licence. It's not a licence like a driver's licence that gives you permission to do something; rather, the license you apply to your software is you giving permission for other people to do something. So, just like your driver's licence is the government saying, "You have our permission to drive a car, as long as you behave in certain ...
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No; incorporating or linking against GPL requires that your project-as-a-whole be distributed under GPL. But you can include MIT licensed parts (or another GPL-compatible license) in the project. Also, it depends.
The pertinent clause is 5 (c):
c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a ...
19
That depends.
If you didn't make any changes in your fork of the project, you can just update your fork to include the latest upstream changes and get the license change along with it.
If the copyrights on the changes made on your fork are all owned by you, and you agree with re-licensing those changes under the MIT license, then you can merge the upstream ...
answered Jul 29 '19 at 8:07
Bart van Ingen Schenau
11.1k1 gold badge21 silver badges36 bronze badges
18
The important thing to know is that they (almost certainly (*)) cannot retroactively change the license of the version that you are using. They can change the license to new versions they release. So, if you want to keep using what you took when it was marked MIT, you are fine. You can even make a fork and invite other like-minded people to enhance and ...
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Depending on how they chose to provide their fork, yes.
The MIT license, which you chose to license your work under, doesn't prevent anyone downstream from changing the license, nor from changing the license of a derivative - unlike a copyleft license such as the GPL. They can essentially license their fork how they like.
If they relicense it under CC BY-...
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As the copyright holder you are in no way bound by any open source license you choose to distribute your own work under.
While you cannot retroactively change the license terms of a particular distribution of your software for those who have already obtained it, you can permit use and re-distribution under the terms of a more permissive license of any ...
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It's correct but unnecessary. It's there for clarity.
When you do some work, the default copyright position is all rights reserved. Nobody can do anything with your work without your express permission, or a license to do so.
The MIT license is your license to other people, to make it clear what they can do. However, any rights not explicitly granted by ...
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Do not use non-standard opensource licenses
The other answers are great, and show that what you want to do is probably not too far down an OSS route but here is a different viewpoint.
There's a reason you use MIT license at the moment, because it fits (the majority, noted) of license requirements you are happy to put on your project. Others who use OSS ...
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I think you've answered your own question...
While you don't need to disclose your source code, you'll need to mention/acknowledge the MIT software. It's simple, copy the MIT license for the library to your distribution.
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The MIT license doesn't require source code to be published. It only requires that the license notice is kept intact. MIT-licensed binaries without source code are rare – no source kinda defeats the purpose of open source – but it's also not the first time I've heard about this construction.
Even for licenses like the GPL that do require source code, it's ...
14
The copyright line isn't actually part of the license, it's a separate entity. So changing that doesn't change the license. In fact "©" is the correct form, so that change at least counts as an improvement in my book.
Beyond that though I'd stick to the canonical form of the license if there is one. The MIT license itself has many slight variants, so the ...
14
Substantial portion is a legal term. Its exact definition will depend on jurisdiction, be subject to interpretation and possibly including subjective analyses. When in doubt, ask a lawyer. To err on the safe side, assume that it applies to any portion, no matter the size.
To give you a random example, here's what Wikipedia has to say for Canadian copyright ...
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It seems that you don’t need a typical FLOSS license at all.
If you want to let everyone use the code snippets and allow them to do whatever they want to do with them (which includes publishing these snippets themselves without explicitly granting others the freedom to use these), without having to attribute you and without having to reference a license, ...
12
Yes, provided they license their improvements under MIT or another free/libre license.
Please note that MIT (Expat) is a permissive license, so the fork may no longer be free/libre software - the improvements may even be proprietary (ARR) - in that case, the other party will be able to sell the improved version, but you will not have that option (but you ...
12
There's no legal problem doing that, but it is confusing, and it's almost inevitable that some people will think the MIT license will apply to the whole repository.
This is a situation where a git submodule would make sense - split out the MIT licensed code into its own repository, and link to it with a submodule. Your local folder structure won't have to ...
12
Just like everyone can take your MIT-licensed software and make it proprietary without having to ask all of its authors for permission, you can take your MIT-licensed software and license it under the GPL without asking the contributors.
MIT-licensed software can be integrated/made into GPL-licensed software. The other way around is not possible.
The FSF ...
12
Your assumptions are mostly correct but you can make things a tad simpler...
You are de-facto creating a new package, so you should update your package.json such that it is clear it is something different and a new package. Your users will be thankful for this.
The MIT license requirements are quite minimal: just keep a copy of the copyright and license ...
12
I'm surprised this question doesn't come up more often. It's a tricky issue, and one that is highly open to interpretation.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
There is not a lot of specific guidance on this issue, but a well-researched overview of the topic was published by The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, titled "Open source ...
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For all software libraries, copyright law applies, and you must read and follow the license in order to use it legally. For a MIT licensed code library, if you distribute the resulting package, you must also distribute it with a copy of the license including the original copyright notices. Failure to do so is "stealing" or more technically a copyright ...
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Adding a requirement to notify you when a fork is being made renders a license non-free. The reasoning behind this is that the requirement discriminates against people that, for whatever reason, are not able to send the required notification (for example, because their government doesn't allow free communication with foreigners).
If being notified is not a ...
answered Jun 15 '18 at 6:28
Bart van Ingen Schenau
11.1k1 gold badge21 silver badges36 bronze badges
10
You can license your intellectual property under different licenses to different people. But when your license follows the definitions of open source and/or free software, the licensees have the right to relicense it under the same terms to other people. So this would not be an effective way to control distribution.
When you want to control distribution, ...
10
It looks like you want a permissive license. Perhaps, you could use the unlicense?
From their site:
The Unlicense is a template for disclaiming copyright monopoly interest in software you've written; in other words, it is a template for dedicating your software to the public domain. It combines a copyright waiver patterned after the very successful ...
10
The MIT license is so simple, you should be able to find the answer to your questions by just reading it. It has only one requirement:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
This means that you have no obligation to specify that a program is a derivative work, nor to ...
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If you hold the copyright to some code (usually, because you are the author), you may license that code however you please, and you may issue different licenses at any time. The matter of revoking previously-issued licenses is much trickier and may not be possible. If you have previously issued permission to modify/distribute your code under some version of ...
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They are also planning to change the licensing of the project, or make it dual-license.
Unless you have signed a CLA or assigned the copyright of your contributions in some way, they cannot legally do either of these options. You are the copyright holder of your contributions, and therefore you, and only you, get to say which license or licenses they are ...
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