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I would like to include the Highcharts library in an open-source project, scala-notebook, and I'm not sure, whether it's allowed according to the Highcharts licence.
scala-notebook is a web-repl (read-eval-print-loop) or web-console (similar to IPython). One can create new notebooks and write code there that will be executed on the server side, and results would be rendered on the page (in the output section). I would like to give the user the ability to define chart data in the code and then it would be rendered as a chart using the Highcharts library. It's distributed under the Modified BSD License
(also known as New or Revised BSD).
So my questions are:
Am I allowed to add the Highcharts library in the project distribution?
If yes, then what should I include in order to correctly cite Highcharts licencing information in my project (for example I can add it to the help section of the page and/or add the license to the root of the project's file tree, etc.)?
My project is open-source, so I can imagine, that someone will download it and will deploy it internally at his/her company. I also want to make sure this use-case is permitted (according to the license).
IF you are using it non-commercially, THEN you are allowed to use it according to the CC BY-NC.
As far as I can tell you should be allowed (since it doesn't have the share-alike clause) to redistribute under any license you please; if this is morally justified is another question.
Note that the Creative Commons licenses are not aimed for software, so the waters with regards to linking, combining with other licenses etc. are a bit murky.
It might be best to ask the people from Highchart your question (or even send them a link to this Stack Overflow question).
You can use it with some open source projects, however you can not use it with Free Software.
Unfortunately it is a copyright violation to use Highcharts with GPL code as the commercial restriction violates the GPL.
This is a problem unfortunately, as even the Highcharts website potentially violates the GPL by including Highcharts with the Joomla code, although there is an argument that as long as Highchart does not distribute the code from its website it might be in the clear.
Theres no concievable way to use Highcharts with an AGPL website.
The problems with combining "not for commercial" and GPL code are explained here.
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/214904/is-free-for-non-commercial-use-license-compatible-with-gnu-gplv3-license
At the moment Highcharts offer an OEM License which "allows you to distribute Highcharts in your software or hardware product", maybe the've added this after (and because?) this question arose. The OEM license agreement will give you information on how to use it.
Anyway, I don't think any other license of the product will allow you to do this.
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I have situation where developer claims that website which she is working for my firm is based on opensource CMS/framework Silverstripe. Second claim is that he want his code to be implemented on machine where I dont have access. In addition I have possibility to switch domain on/off from IP he provided me. I can't see actually what he coded and what is feature of cms.
My question is: Is that situation usual? And what are my rights as customer according to BSD licence? Can I view the code he is coding? Especially i have impression that he is renting software to me in that way. But want to be paid in terms of architect and develope hours. Can someone clarify situation to me?
It is "usual" for a developer to take advantage of open source components - in fact, there are many advantages of using proven open source components instead of building them from scratch (e.g. speed up the development, widely used open source component can be pretty robust etc).
You do need to make sure there isn't any licensing concerns, but in this particular case, you should be fine with BSD license, as it is one of the most permissive license out there. All you need to do is meet its attribution requirements (essentially including the original copyright and license text in tact).
RE your right to the source code... it really depends on what your contract is with the developer. The BSD license does not force developers to release any derivative work (i.e. work based on the BSD licensed code) to be also released under open source, and/or make the source code available. So you can view the source code of Silverstripe from its website (Silverstripe being open source), but your developer does not need to make the source code of her code and/or any modification she might have made on Silverstripe available to anyone. She could even sell Silverstipe code unchanged should she want to.
So whether you should have access to your developer's code is really governed by what agreement you have with the developer regarding her work i.e. whether you own all the IP produced by the developer including the source code.
IMHO the license is pretty clear: As long as you keep the copyright notice, you can do whatever you want (change, sell,...).
So what your developer is doing, is ok in terms of the SilverStripe license. The rest is up to your contract.
Is it usual? While I would try to avoid this and it's probably not the norm, it's hardly unusual. However, you are bound to the developer in the future, which might lead to problems:
"Change developer? Sure you can — if you start from scratch again."
"My rate just went up, but I'm sure it's cheaper than starting over."
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I am doing some research/exploring into different site designs and architecture. Generally speaking, I would like to read up on different patterns and practices that are being done today for web sites.
Specifically, I am looking for a composable and/or plugin site design. The main purpose of this setup would be for it to allow each plugin or part of the site to be developed independently of the other parts. Hopefully with little working knowledge of the other pieces. I know there will be some knowledge spread between the peices for authentication and authorization. The main goal would be to limit the coupling between sections of the site and limit impact of code changes to other parts of the site.
I have a few ideas but I am not sure if they are piratical. That is why I am trying to find more info on what others have done.
Some ideas.
Idea 1 was to create a MVC site that allowed plugins to be deployed. There are a few ways to do this. Seen here, here and here. Plugins could be developed and run interdependently of the main site. Once completed could be dropped in and tested with the main core. One set of master pages, CSS, and whatever else. This is similar to the plugin model for most CMS systems (ex: wordpress)
The second idea would be a single sign on design. Every section of the site could be hosted as its own domain/site/ect. but auth would be done in a sign point. Some ideas on how to do this could be seen here. Master pages, CSS and other items would probably have to be repeated between the different sections.
And the 3rd idea was a mixture of the two. The "core" site would handle styling and layout. The content would be ajax calls to the different sections of the site which could be hosted on the same domain or not.
I have not flushed these ideas out or done any prototyping yet. I am in the brainstorming portion of this process. The only thing that is set in stone is it will be written with C#/asp.net mvc and there must be only one sign in between sections of the site. Other than that, everything is fair game.
I use RazorGenerator. It's installable via NuGet (plus an install of a VS tool) and all you have to do is set the Custom Tool property on your views.
Your core site would then have to use the virtual path provider idea. You can use Chris van de Steeg's approach for this as he's already built all the code you need.
The glue that makes it all work is the third and arguably the most important point: how do allow plugins to "expose" their end points (controllers and actions)? And how do you do this in the correct context and whereabouts on your site?
For this I use a framework DLL that exposes a ton of interfaces for different scenarios. The main site creates managers for the different types of end points, and I have several layouts and helper classes that call on the managers to render the end points at the correct location. At application start-up, I iterate over all the plugin DLLs in a pre-defined directory and use reflection to inspect their interfaces, then add them to the appropriate managers.
I have also created a "management" area in the site to disable end points so that admins can override the plugin's default behavior.
As far as I know, and as evidenced by my efforts to-date, there is no pre-existing project to handle this. Hope this helps in your direction.
I went with idea 1 above. Here is some example code of creating a plugin site for ASP.NET MVC that doesn't no require any 3rd party references. It also includes all site content to be embedded in the plugin dll. Enjoy!
https://github.com/Oobert/ASP.NET-MVC-Plugins
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I am planning to start a commercial web project (like e.g. facebook) which requires a database.
I've read through all the licenses and FAQ's of MySQL, PostgreSQL and HSQLDB but I am still not certain if I need to purchase a license (commercial type) or have to publish the source code of my web project (open source license) since I am not a lawyer.
My Question is: Can I use any of the databases mentioned above for my commercial project without having to purchase a commercial license or publish my source?
If not, is there a database out there which I could use?
You can use MySQL and PostgreSQL commercially without any sort of purchase. You can purchase support agreements from them, if you need it.
You would not be required to publish your source code simply because you're using an open source database. Only if your project was a modification of the database engine would you need to provide the source.
edit: Per the comment by Pekka above, I realize that I was assuming this was a web site based project with a server-side database engine. If this is not the case, my answer could be misleading.
I contacted the mysql guys and they said that using MySQL as described in my initial post is free of charge:
Certainly during the development phase
there is no requirement to purchase a
license as you can use the Community
Server for that, however it would make
sense that once you went live you
would purchase MySQL Enterprise to
ensure you had access to the most
stable versions and support.
More information can be found at:
http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/oem/
Community Server is released under the
GNU General Public License Version 2
(also known as the GPLv2). This can
be found at
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html
Provided your use of MySQL Community
Server complies with the GPLv2 then
you are free to use it. If you are in
any doubt, then it is worth looking at
Enterprise.
I also asked if I had to release/publish my code under a open source license if I used the community server. This is the answer I got:
I am not a lawyer, so please take this
into account. Also you probably
should be talking to the sales staff
on what you can and cannot do, you can
get their details from the contact
pages on www.mysql.com. However as I
understand the GPL unless you are
distributing MySQL with your code you
do not need to release your code under
the GPL. If, however, you do
distribute MySQL then you either need
an OEM/ISV license or your code must
be under the GPL, or one of the other
Open Source licenses covered in the
FOSS exceptions listed in the FAQ page
I gave you.
Safe answer: talk to a lawyer.
If I didn't know the safe answer, I'd tell you that you can use any one of those without paying anybody and without having to publish your source code. Luckily, I know the safe answer so I didn't tell you that.
edit — Note that finding the appropriate lawyer to talk to might be a difficult task. The point is that if you're actually starting a business and you feel uncertain of your ability to interpret license terms yourself (which is to say that you feel uncertain of your ability to be your own lawyer), the right thing to do is seek out legal advice from an actual attorney, and not from random unknown people on the internet.
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I want to use Fisheye to host my codebase online in a secure manner. As my portfolio is open source (I publish code to it via a file explorer control and also parts of the site's code, plus the rest of the site code soon), I need a more scalable and organised manner of storing the code.
I checked out Atlassian Fisheye and its requirements to get an open source edition are as follows:
"Using an approved open source license"
I went to http://www.opensource.org/licenses to look at licenses. Has anyone got any experience of applying to this? What was the outcome?
Thanks
I'm not sure whether I understand your question right, but there is no application process for using an Open Source license. You just publish your content under one of the existing licenses, there is no need for approval from the license's author.
You just need to make sure the terms of the license you choose to use fit your intentions.
The most common way of putting code under a license is to add information about it into the comment header of each file, and/or placing a text file named LICENSE into the project's root.
An example comment header from the jquery.js file that actually applies two licenses. The user can pick which license they want to use the code under. (If you want to make totally sure, you can add a URL to the license text, or copy+paste the whole license, which is a bit of an overkill in most cases though.)
/*!
* jQuery JavaScript Library v1.4.1
* http://jquery.com/
*
* Copyright 2010, John Resig
* Dual licensed under the MIT or GPL Version 2 licenses.
* http://jquery.org/license
...
If you mean actually authoring an own license and having it endorsed by the Open Source foundation, I apologize. I don't know anything about that.
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I am considering starting an OSS project and would like some advice.
I would like to use a licence that allows free use of the project for personal and non-profit use but would allow me to charge for a commercial licence (like or similar to http://www.extjs.com/company/dual.php).
Could someone please advise or link to some articles on how to approach this? Thanks in advance.
As the Open-Source-definition describes, you cannot limit the usage of your project, if you want to stay open-source. In other words: you cannot forbid a commercial use for an open-source-app. So you can choose another (non-open-source) license, that fulfills your demands, or you choose another way.
One possibility is to release only the source under open-source-license and have another license for binary distributions. As far as I know thats true for Java. That works good, if the build of your app is somewhat complicated.
You can release your app under the GPL-license. That does not forbid commercial use. But if some derivate work is created, it has to be GPL-licensed too. That works well for libraries or similar stuff that isn't used alone, but in a merged product. EDIT: As DrJokepu mentions, using a GPL-framework in a webserver-stack would help to avoid to release your own sources. That's why one extension to the GPL is the Affero GPL, that need you to release your work under the same license (AGPL) even if you don't release it, but only use it to build a public webpage. So for webservices you need the AGPL to achieve the same result.
You can't us an OSI-certified Open Source license and ban commercial use.
If what you want to do is stop somebody from taking your software and selling their version as some sort of shrink-wrapped software, you can use a GPL-style license. For maximum compatibility, I'd recommend GPLv2+ (Gnu General Public License, version 2, or any later version at your discretion). With that license, somebody can sell your software, but they have to make it clear that anybody can get the source, and that it can be freely redistributed. That would, I think, cover most of what people want to ban as commercial use.
The producing open-source software book has a great section on dual licensing. It outlines the approach where a single entity, such as a foundation "owns" the copyright to a projects source.
The foundation chooses to make the source available under two different licensing schemes, one closed and another that is open-source. For your particular case you will want to ensure that you stick with a strong copyleft license (i.e. such as GPL) to prevent commercial derivative works of the freely available source code.
However, as others have noted, this does not prevent commercial entities from using your software, just from taking your work and selling it to others. In some cases this works out, as strangely enough, many organisations would rather purchase something than download and use something for free. These are the same sorts of organisations that need legally binding contracts with vendors and some form of support. I.e. When you sell software you are actually selling a whole bunch of other services at the same time as a "shrink wrapped" product.
Now, how can code be kept closed and sold, as well as released under the GPL license? The mind bending legal part of the whole arrangement, is that contributions of IP to the foundation are not made under the GPL license. Rather, developers give their IP to the foundation under "contributor agreements" which pass on copyright of their changes to the foundation and permit the foundation to release the code under two different licenses. This last little caveat is the big downside to dual licensing, sometimes developers are not interested in contributor agreements, they want there changes only available under the open-source license and nothing else. Quite a few contributor agreements that kick around the place, but here is the one that sun uses for MySQL.