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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 looking for a license that allows developers who release their software freely/non-commercially use my software without any cost, but those who releases commercial software needs to buy a license. I've been looking at the GNU licenses but they all seem to be free for both commercial and non-commercial use.
What are the commonly used licenses in my case?
There can be no general answer to your question, you either do this by creating your own software license (which can not be free as in The Free Software Definition because you restrict commercial use) or you can try to achieve something similar with dual licensing as following:
The public and freely available software is available under a free software license with strong copyleft like the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). Any entity making use of the software must publish the source and changes to all it's users under the same license (reciprocal, ASP loophole closed).
You can even make the software practicable incompatible with mostly any open source software by choosing the Open Software License (OSL). It's incompatible in this sense with most of the existing open source software (first hand GPL which covers the largest share of open source code, but also many others) and has strong copyleft by usage (communication of the work even), so it's pretty limiting.
You would actually signal: don't use the free version - a somewhat morally questionable move.
As (and if) this is not fitting for the type of commercial use you ask about, then you can offer a second license for commercial use. If someone complains you can just tell them, hey it's free software. Bad move, but probably working. Ask your lawyer for the details, this variant might not be what you're looking for, you won't do the free software community a favor.
Instead you need to find out what you actually want to do. Restrict commercial use or not. After you've done that, talk with a lawyer to create a fitting software license for your work.
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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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I am developing a web based opensource project. I was considering the AGPL v3, but I explicitly want to prevent commercial use. Non-profit orgs are welcome to use it for free.
It seems to be a common thing in the software world, but I am looking for a pre-written license that I could use or adapt.
Any ideas where I can find such a thing? Are there accepted opensource licenses that fit this criteria?
It is not a good idea to use such a license, because it is sometimes very hard to draw the line between commercial and non-commercial, especially juridically.
However, you may check out Creative Commons licenses.
You won't find any open source licenses that prevent commercial use. That's against the spirit of open source and wouldn't fit into the definition of open source.
There cannot possibly be such a license. Forbidding the use of the source code is the exact opposite of open source. Ergo, there cannot ever possible be an open source license which has such a restriction, and a license which has such a restriction cannot ever possibly be an open source license.
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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.