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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 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'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 starting an opensource project.
I want to allow the following:
Free for noncommercial use, bins and source mods, like with the GPL, but I would like to retain commercial rights for myself, and provide another license for commercial use for customers who prefer that option.
The number of licensing options seem a bit overwhelming. So my question is:
Which opensource license should I
use?
Which commercial license should I
use, if there are any standard ones
available? Or should I come up with
my own one here?
There is no problem with dual-licensing. GPL is fine for the noncommercial variant, and is widely accepted.
With the commercial one, I do not know of any standard ones. I would recommend you write one, that really suits your needs.
There is Hanselminutes Podcast on licenses here: Open Source Software Licensing with Jonathan Zuck of ACT Online. Towards the end they talk about the dual licensing of the MySQL database.
There is also a transscript of the podcast as PDF, have a look at the end of the first column on page 7.
No open source license (as defined by the Open Source Initiative) will forbid commercial use of software. You can use a version of the GPL to disallow taking your software proprietary; companies could still use it internally, or distribute it for their own purposes, but they couldn't package it up and sell it as normal shrinkwrap software. Don't use a license like Boost or BSD, as they allow unlimited commercial usage with no restrictions.
You should decide what commercial use you want to allow, and that will depend heavily on the software and what people might want to use it for.
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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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Is there any codeplex license that allows some one to use my code any way they want but not to create a program that does the same thing that my programs do?
The only way you can prevent a program from reproducing functionality is with patents.
Following on from your comment:
You will need to have a lawyer draft a license as you have very specific needs. The license will have to specify the exact conditions the code can be used under (or the conditions it cannot be used under.)
I am not aware of any "generic" license which covers this type of arrangement. And there are a wealth of issues to consider, for example:
Step 1. You have automatic copyright over your source code. This gives you, and you along the ability to distribute your application legally.
Step 2. You release the code under an open source license. The code is still yours, but now people can use it for whatever they wish, including recompiling and distributing the project under a different name (but with attribution?)
Step 3. You want to impose a restriction on the open source license, which you are within your rights to do. However this has to be very carefully worded and thought out.
Can I use part of the code in a similar application? How do you define similar?
What if I modify it? What about derivative works? Are they the same thing as your product?
Does it cover future versions of the code?
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. These are just ramblings that I can recall from the legal and ethical modules from my CS degree. All I can do is advise you to hire a lawyer to draft a license.