Possible Duplicate:
Licensing for hosted open source and 3rd party libraries
I am newbie in the open source community world. I am planning to develop a open source project, hosted on github. The project would be using other open source components like- NHibernate, FNH, Log4net, CommonLibrary, Autofac, Quartz.Net Scheduler etc etc
My questions are:
- Would there be any restrictions on using above OSS components? for
example: I plan to use MIT license, but Quartz.Net Scheduler uses
Apache license, would there be any restrictions? - How do I get a license for my own project? Do I need to register my
project somewhere? - What is the best practice to mention credits to the OSS compoenents used?
Many thanks,
1
1) Would there be any restrictions on using above OSS components? for
example: I plan to use MIT license, but Quartz.Net Scheduler uses
Apache license, would there be any restrictions?
Yes and No. It depends. Oh, and I’m not a lawyer 🙂
This is a bit complicated. At least that’s what I thought when I published my first OSS project.
Some of the existing licenses are very similar and it’s no big deal to use them together in your project.
For example, there are several “permissive” licenses that basically say “do what you want, but don’t sue me if something goes wrong”.
For example, the MIT License and the BSD license are two of them, and IMO you can use them together.
On the other hand, the GPL license says that if you use a GPL-licensed component, your actual project must be under the GPL as well.
This prevents GPL-licensed components from being used in projects under most (if not all) of the other existing licenses.
If I’m not sure whether I can use a ABC-licensed library in my XYZ-licensed project or not, I just google something like “abc xyz compatible” (or actually “use abc license in xyz licensed project”), or search for it here on Stack Exchange.
You can find a lot of these questions here, for example:
- Is BSD license compatible with Apache?
- MIT app executing a GPL command
- Call GPL software from non-GPL software
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7800486/using-mit-license-in-an-apache-2-0-licensed-project
3) What is the best practice to mention credits to the OSS compoenents used?
That’s how I do it:
What’s the best way to acknowledge many FOSS sources in a single project?
How do I get a license for my own project? Do I need to register my project somewhere?
NO, you do not need an official registration to be done.
For open-source projects you just need a disclaimer saying which open-source licencing you have used and under which open-source licence are you providing the project.
Here you a good reference to look for Open Source Licenses.