Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about programming within the scope defined in the help center.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
Background:
This question caused me some sleepless nights over the last month. I'm an independent software developer and have recently finished the work on my first application. I've read a lot of articles about license agreements but I still don't know how to tackle this task in an appropriate way. My application handles user files. In every method I check for consistency & errors and I've betatested it on several systems for more than 6 months. I'm very sure nothing should go wrong, but I want to be on the save side.
Are license agreements by themselves protected by a copyright or can
I just take one and replace the companies name? (All of them look pretty similar to my untrained eyes)
If I'm allowed to use one, am I allowed to edit it?
I don't want my users to be "kept in a cage". I want them to be as free as they could be. For example I want them to be able to freely install my software on all their personal devices.
Where can I find non-Opensource licenses*? I've been searching for a
long time now. I found this Page but it actually confused me more than it helped.
I plan on publishing my app on the Mac-AppStore. Are there licenses
I can't use there?
(As I mentioned above I want a "User License" model that allows the user to install it on all of his Macs)
If you've got any kind of experience with this topic, feel free to share your insights. It's well appreciated!
*Edit: By "non-Opensource licenses" I mean licenses for commercial applications.
1.
You are free to take an existing agreement you find and adapt it to your ends. There is no originality of expression in a licensing agreement itself that would be covered under copyright law preventing your use of its language -- assuming the language fits your circumstances. You should always understand what you're agreeing to. :-)
P.S. Authority: I've worked with large law firms for 20 years as a software developer, licensing my software to them and also consulting with some of them when they had to write contracts for their own clients and didn't undertand the technical issues.
Related
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 10 years ago.
Improve this question
I am a researcher in Mathematics at a university, and I released a code toolbox that is mostly for research use, but can have applications in engineering and industry.
I would like to have a license that basically says "you can use this code freely if you are in a university and use it for publishing, studying teaching, but not if you are in the industry --- in that case, please reach for the wallet".
CC-NC-BY-SA would look perfect to my eyes, but using it for code is heavily discouraged, I suppose for good reasons. None of the other open source licenses seems to do what I want. Writing my own license looks like a legal mess, and I'd rather avoid it.
How would you solve this issue?
Related questions (but not the exact same thing): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1232666/proper-open-source-license-to-release-academic-code, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6443110/practicalities-of-licensing-academic-software
I assume that toolbox is written by your own and you want to share it with other academics. In case someone from industry is making millions you want your share (well, the sunny-day example).
I don't know any license that comes close to that.
The CC-NC-BY-SA is discouraged because of two reasons mainly:
CC licenses are not for software. They know nothing about the two most prominent forms of software: Object Code (binary, compiled) and the Source Code (author version).
Non-Commercial. It is undefined what this term means, especially legally.
So you use your morally and subjective day-to-day terms and every human on the planet comes pretty close in understanding what you mean, but putting this into a copyright related software license is problematic.
I'm not a lawyer, but probably some kind of passive licensing would suit your needs. There just is no license, you put your term:
"you can use this code freely if you are in a university and use it for publishing, studying teaching, but not if you are in the industry --- in that case, please reach for the wallet
and then say this is in your own words, you decide about the meaning in case it's unclear now or in the future. (if you talk with your lawyer, a suggestion will come up that you should disclaim warranties and such which is normally suggested.)
Most academic users I bet are fine with this. Commercial users are pressured for more clarification, so you can run contracts then. Job done.
The other route would be you release under a strong copyleft license like the AGPL. This would engage user-rights (so you give a lot), however this would be the typical something-for-something, because they need to offer the software as well to all of their users under AGPL, including their changes and add-ons.
Additionally you can offer "commercial" licenses (AGPL does not forbid commercial use, however it requires to preserve the freedom of the software) as long as you're the copyright owner.
Probably either the little suspicous, "I name no license" policy, or something that's okay for you to give (strong copyleft) + X might do it. There are pros and cons for either of these two paths, so chew a bit and maybe you get a third idea that's doing it for you.
However, I am not aware of any existing license that covers your case. You might find some through research because I'm normally not interested in licenses that are for some user-groups only (e.g. only academics, only non-commercial), because the borders are not clear.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about programming within the scope defined in the help center.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
I didn't see any license information on top of a web page's source code. Now I'd like to copy/paste a javascript code to emulate the behaviour of AJAX into my software.
But can I do this?
At least in the United States, every work is automatically granted copyright protection of its owner, regardless of any copyright declaration or licensing information. You can only be granted rights to use or re-use works under the explicit grant of permissions by copyright owners.
If there's no license on the files, then you have no right to re-use them in your own projects. You're free to email them and ask politely, or search around and see if those tools are freely available elsewhere (and the site where you found them stripped off the documenting headers), or to take inspiration from their site and try to replicate it yourself.
There's enough excellent libraries out there (jQuery and prototype.js come to mind immediately) with enough amazing functionality that you ought to be able to build something cool on your own, in case the owners of the site you found don't want to share their code.
No. Unless you have a license, you don't have a license.
Take a book, it might not be written "You allowed to read it and make a short citation. You should not print copies of it and give it away to people. Neither are you allowed to upload it on piratebay". However, usually you are not allowed to do it.
In most countries, software is covered by copyright as books and other things.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about programming within the scope defined in the help center.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
So I am almost finished with my first app. It was constructed in Visual Studio/C#. I am now trying to determine which license to run with. I plan to provide the program free of charge to businesses and consumers, however, I do not want to publish the source code.
What is the best licensing format to go with? This application is kind of a teaser for a more powerful version so I would like to publish this one for free and hopefully make some money selling the 'power user' version.
I will be packaging Putty with this. I am about to go read their site as I may need to role my own SSH client.
I will be headed to my lawyer this week. Just want to get a bit of knowledge before I talk to her so I don't look like a dumb fool. Thanks in advance for your input!
Putty uses the MIT licence, so all you need to do is incorporate that licence along with your software. For your code you can use whatever licence you choose, no one will ask for your code unless you explicitly want to make it public.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about programming within the scope defined in the help center.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I am going to development a product related to security. It's my personal belief that any security related product should release it's source code for review. However, I also want to sell it as a commercial product and keep the code ownership to myself and don't expect deviated work.
Is there a software license for this purpose? Thanks.
The Microsoft Reference Source License comes to mind for this kind of requirement.
Ordinary copyright law should do this - if you don't grant a license to anyone, then people can read your code if you publish it, but you retain all rights to it.
I would agree with you with respect to review, but that doesn't mean that it needs to be published in the public domain. You could make it available upon request but require that anyone obtaining it (a) not disclose the code itself to another and (b) not use the code to develop a product in competition with yours. Get a lawyer to fine-tune the language. In this way, you can have your code available for inspection and verification but retain some reasonable assurance that it won't simply be copied by unscrupulous competitors -- or, at least, have a more solid case in the event that it is used without your consent.
Yes, it's called copyright + non-disclosure agreement.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about programming within the scope defined in the help center.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
I've got a commercial SaaS application, an online collaboration/lean project mgmt tool. I want to offer a "Community Edition", with specific limitations on how the software can be used, for free. For example
free for groups using it to manage open source projects
free to K-12 teachers to use in the classroom
free for authors collaborating on Lean/Kanban/AgileSoftwareDevelopment books and research papers.
free for community conference organizers, user group organizers, etc.
The license would grant use of the software with limitations. The software itself can enforce limitations on the number of users/projects. I'm looking for a license agreement / EULA that I can use to specify what uses the software can be used for (see above). It would restrict the users from using it in different ways, such as for commercial use, managing consulting projects, client work, etc.
I've been combing the web for good examples of such agreements, and so far coming up short. Any ideas? To be clear, this would not be an open source license of any kind. It would cover the use of commercial software, for specific "community" uses, as we define them.
I'd pay a lawyer and have him write up the EULA.
You'll forget something, or have some sort of loophole you won't notice.
It's always best to ask for legal advice from a lawyer.
You could do worse than start with a terms of service document. Some companies and products have put their TOS under the Creative Commons license, so you would be free to use that to get started. You could have a look at the one from Wordpress for instance.
Have a look at how Atlassian or JetBrains do it. They offer Jira instances/IntellijIDEA licenses for open source projects and project committers and have been doing so for a long time with great success.
If you start without a fully prepared license agreement, at least do not forget to state that the license is subject to change at any time and the user agrees to any future change or has to stop using the service immediately.