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
Years ago I released a program called Banshee Screamer Alarm and at the time it included the full source code, "for educational purposes only." You couldn't extend it to make your own version, but you could learn from it. It actually helped somebody fix a bug in wine.
If I release more software like this (open source, but copyrighted and non-free), are there any legal thorns that I should know about? Are there any suitable licenses for this purpose?
I don't see any problems, but then I'm not a lawyer and have no real interest in proprietary software licenses. You should be able to just ship source without trouble, much like the old days of interpreted BASIC. There were plenty of proprietary programs distributed that way.
However, quite a few people would appreciate it if you'd call it "source included" or something like that rather than "open source". The Open Source Initiative has a clear meaning for "open source", and you aren't coming anywhere near their definition.
Adding the source for educational purposes only sounds good to me. Microsoft did similar with their Shared Source initiative.
You might want to avoid the open source moniker though, if you don't use an OSI approved license.
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 9 years ago.
Improve this question
If I make a (web-based if it matters) game and have the inventory portion of it from an open source inventory program, what do I disclose?
I would say part X came from open source, or I just "hacked" then inventory system and put my game as a front end.
I just don't know where I put that on my website, or do I wait until someone asks? Does this mean my part of the software is also open source? What am I supposed to do?
I'm not sure how to ask it. I want to do the right thing and all.
It depends on the license that the open source inventory program is under. Have you looked into that yet?
This is a good place to start for comparisons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_software_licenses
You have not asked much specific with your question. The general answer is: It depends.
On what does it depend you might then ask yourself. It depends on the usage terms of the software you make use of.
You only have shared so far that the software is "open source". That term does not say much. It could mean you refer to an OSI certified Opensourcetm license, however, you wrote "open source" which might be a different term. Probably you have picked something from github (compare: Can I use the code in a Github project which does not have a license specified?) ?
So unless you do not share which kind of license that is you talk about not much could be said:
If it is a permissive Free Software license, your code can normally stay under it's own license.
If it is a copyleft Free Software license, your code normally is being licensed under the same license.
If it is a compromise license, it depends on the type of work and way of interaction / derivation / usage / packaging.
In any case it always depends on
the concrete licenses for all works in question.
the concrete type of work and way of combining it with your work.
if you plan to go conform with the licensing or you want to exploit it.
You have not specified much of both, so no better suggestion can be given. Also take note that IANAL and this is only some personal opinion of a layman.
And do not wait until someone does something. You should be the active party to find out. That works best by contacting the original author of that component, tell her what you want to do with it and keep the written allowance you get from her with your records. Especially as you are unsure. And the original author has enough power to allow you things even apart from the public visible license btw..
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
This is a point that has always confused me about open source software. Normally, I write everything from scratch. What I'm trying to find out is what licenses allows me to do this?
Stay away from the GPL (LGPL is okay) and you won't have any problems. If you want to include GPLed packages in your application, things get tricky. BSD and MIT style licenses will get you the fewest obligations. In general, find the software package you want to use and read the license. They're usually pretty straightforward about what is and is not acceptable to do.
Why would you want to do more work? Of course you should. All you have to do is redistribute the OS technology source with your app (I am not a lawyer, but thats how I understand it).
The assumes
1) You are talking about an established open source solution, like hibernate, that you can reasonably assume works well.
2) The product you are developing is not using the open source technology as the 'secret sauce' that is going to make you money. Else you might have to open source that special part of your app.
If the software actually fits what you're trying to do, then yes it does cut down on development time. If the software mostly fits what you're trying to do you may end up spending more time trying to work with it rather than solving the problem it's meant to solve.
I am not a lawyer, so be sure to run a license past legal council if in doubt
As far as licensing goes, there are a number of licenses that allow you to incorporate the software into your commercial application. Most of the time as long as the license isn't a Copyleft type license (i.e. GPL) you can distribute the software as is. If you have to make changes that get distributed with your application, some licenses will requires the source also be distributed with it and an indication of what's different from the core project.
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'm working on a web based ladder system for a game. It is very game specific and I want to make the project open source so the community can give back, contribute and make the experience better for everyone. However at the same time I don't want people to re-use the code/implement the code on separate sites because the purpose of the website/project is to unify the community under one roof. So my question is: what is the best license to use to make that possible?
... I don't want people to re-use the code/implement the code on separate sites ...
This really misses the point of Free Software, or as the FSF puts it, it's open source but not really Free Software. Despite my tone, I'm not here to lecture you, I'm simply pointing out that people are not likely to help if the project has this kind of restriction.
However, if you change that to:
... I don't want people to re-use the code/implement the code on separate sites without contributing any modifications they make back to the project ...
Then the GNU Affero General Public License might be appropriate; it prevents people from modifying your website unless they publish their changes under the same license.
If you still insist on your original restriction, then no open source license will help you, since most of them are about being Free Software, not just open source. You're going to have to write your own license, or modify an existing one.
Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
I am new to the world of open source so please answer accordingly!
I have seen many licenses in use, like GPL, MIT, Apache license. Of course I don't want to be a lawyer, but having at least a basic knowledge of all these would be helpful.
So where do I start? Do I simply read up these licenses? Or is there a book/ website out there that explains all this?
While it's probably not going to help much, I recently had a look at the page Open Source Licenses by Category over at www.opensource.org. Take a look at the category "License that are popular and widely used or with strong communities". I think that would be a good starting point.
While you'd probably have to be a lawyer to really understand and know all implications of every license, you can grasp the main differences by looking at them. Not all license texts are as long as that of GNU's GPL, so don't be afraid to look at them. (The MIT license is a good example. You can read it in about 1 minute's time.)
(The GNU GPL, btw., is considered by some to be the most restrictive open-source license, when it comes to using software in a commercial product. I think that was the initial reason why they came up with the GNU LGPL.)
Some more pointers to other questions here on Stack Overflow:
Corporate-Friendly Open Source Licenses (asked Aug 26 2008) -- mentions the Apache license
Which license should I use for my open source project (asked May 20 2010) -- mentions the GNU LGPL
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
I am currently working as a consultant but i found that i have not been doing coding for a very long time.
So i wonder if there are any other nice websites beside sourceforge.net which can allows me to do some coding.
Thanks
sourceforge.net - All sorts of open source software, from Linux to BSD to Windows.
codeplex.com - Mainly Microsoft technologies-focused. This is where you'll find more of the .NET open source stuff.
For general indexes to open source software, see freshmeat and Ohloh. The former is a classic index of open source software and the latter has statistics about the source code for each project, which might be handy if you want to judge how active a project is.
If you want to join easily, distributed revision control is nice. The big hosting sites for Mercurial (Bitbucket), Git (Github) and Bazaar (Launchpad) should give you plenty of projects to browse and, hopefully, contribute to :-)
OpenHatch (openhatch.org) is nifty (IMO) because:
The site provides a number of "bite size" bugs from Free Open Source Software (FOSS) projects.
There is a Map showing the registered users in your area, along with the langauges and projects they are involved in.
The site provides an email forwarding address with rotating "anti-spam salt" by which other contributors may reach out to contact you. (You may choose whether to use this, or provide an alternate means to contact you on the site.)
Also, there's Github and Google Code
Google Code.
IMO, much nicer than SourceForge.
How about Google Summer of Code?
If you're just looking for a small quick project, Clusterify.
Ohloh is an other good collection of open source projects.
It provide details, timeline and notes.
There's lots of under served open source sectors that you can give your extra time to.
You don't have to do what everyone else is doing, take for example, the loads of time wasting CMS projects out there, while there seems to be no proper OCR in Java, and Jira is a great issue tracking system, no doubt, but its not open source, Bugzilla sucks, don't say Mantis, and Eventum is written in PHP(I'm a Java fanatic)
The best source for open source projects is of course sourceforge.net, Google code, not so much.
We can not say that one website is better, it depends on the domain you work, so your best friend is well http://www.google.com with your keywords