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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.
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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.
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I'm looking an good open source license that does not require the copyright notice/license itself be included in the source code, and with a "no warranty clause." Does anyone know of one?
I want this because the software in question is an extremely simple bookmarklet. Including the license with the Javascript would easily triple the size of the code. Even setting that aside, requiring license inclusion would present an unnecessary hurdle to the novice programmers who are otherwise perfectly capable of modifying the bookmarklet.
I've Googled around on this and haven't found anything except the "WTFPL" which does not include a warranty clause because it is not strictly a software license. Also, WTFPL requires you to change the name of the code if you modify it. I also looked at some license comparison charts but most don't bother to catalog license inclusion requirements since it's a total non issue with most software.
As for releasing into the public domain, this thread indicates that is not an internationally portable concept: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/219742/open-source-why-not-release-into-public-domain
The only reason I'm bothering to put it under a license is that, one day after publishing the bookmarklet, I received an email from someone in France asking if he could translate/improve it, and I'd like to encourage anyone else to do the same without having to email me.
The solution I settled was to use the MIT license but with an URL as the copyright notice (in a simple comment at the top of the bookmarklet).
I noticed that some other bookmarklets and general Javascript on Github used this approach, e.g. https://github.com/gleuch/shaved-bieber/blob/master/shaved-bieber.js
Also, a discussion on the OSI page for MIT license indicates this is common practice and probably OK; see comments http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
It woud be nice if this was explicitly allowed in the MIT license but I'd rather bet on this notification idiom being legit/valid than invent my own license. It's only a bookmarklet, after all :-)
I figured you could just say it's public domain. No warantee, but I'm no lawyer.
Have you had a look at the gnu license list? It includes many that are not acceptable to them as well.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
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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.
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How would one follow the proper steps in order to license a "package" under the terms of Artistic License 2, as published by the Perl Foundation.
Is there a guide, such as GNU's GPL how-to that I'm missing?
I've only found CPAN's Licensing Guide, I believe it would apply for external use too, wouldn't it?
Otherwise, I presume adding a notice at the start of each source code file, and including a copy of the license itself with the distribution would do the trick.
Still, since licensing is quite an important issue, I'd like to hear any views on this.
Before I start, I must warn you I'm not a lawyer.
As far as I know, the way you communicate the license to others is not dependent on any specific license. If you're the sole author of the work, you hold the copyright and have the exclusive rights to decide what is allowed with respect to distribution, modification etc. You can communicate your decision through a well known licence to help potential users of your work understand the terms of usage.
From a practical view, adding a copyright notice to the distribution & copyright headers pointing to that notice to source files should be enough. Also, the licence should be clearly mentioned on the site where you provide download of the distribution.
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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.