Over the past couple weeks I have gotten a lot of help from StackOverflow users on a project, and rather than keep the finished product to myself I wanted to share it unencumbered by licenses, but don’t want there to be so much legwork during installation that users shy away from trying it.
I am about to post it to Github and choosing public domain licensing. I would like to to be super simple for users to make use of and just FTP it up and go.
That being said, do I need to make sure I remove things like the JQuery file, and other GPL / MIT licensed dependencies that I didn’t write but that my code depends on? I haven’t removed any copyright notices from the other code and all of it open source, it would just be nice if users could download everything at once while of course not trying to represent that I am the license holder of the dependencies.
Inside my files are also some snippets, do those have to be externalized with installation instructions or can it be posted as is? Here is an example, my nav.php file is 115 lines long and I have these at the top:
<script type="text/javascript" src="./js/ddaccordion.js">
/***********************************************
* Accordion Content script- (c) Dynamic Drive DHTML code library (www.dynamicdrive.com)
* Visit http://www.dynamicDrive.com for hundreds of DHTML scripts
* This notice must stay intact for legal use
***********************************************/
</script>
<link href="css/admin.css" rel="stylesheet">
<script type="text/javascript">
ddaccordion.init({
headerclass: "submenuheader", //Shared CSS class name of headers group
contentclass: "submenu", //Shared CSS class name of contents group
revealtype: "click", //Reveal content when user clicks or onmouseover the header? Valid value: "click", "clickgo", or "mouseover"
mouseoverdelay: 200, //if revealtype="mouseover", set delay in milliseconds before header expands onMouseover
collapseprev: false, //Collapse previous content (so only one open at any time)? true/false
defaultexpanded: [], //index of content(s) open by default [index1, index2, etc] [] denotes no content
onemustopen: false, //Specify whether at least one header should be open always (so never all headers closed)
animatedefault: false, //Should contents open by default be animated into view?
persiststate: true, //persist state of opened contents within browser session?
toggleclass: ["", ""], //Two CSS classes to be applied to the header when it's collapsed and expanded, respectively ["class1", "class2"]
togglehtml: ["suffix", "<img src='./images/plus.gif' class='statusicon' />", "<img src='./images/minus.gif' class='statusicon' />"], //Additional HTML added to the header when it's collapsed and expanded, respectively ["position", "html1", "html2"] (see docs)
animatespeed: "fast", //speed of animation: integer in milliseconds (ie: 200), or keywords "fast", "normal", or "slow"
oninit:function(headers, expandedindices){ //custom code to run when headers have initalized
//do nothing
},
onopenclose:function(header, index, state, isuseractivated){ //custom code to run whenever a header is opened or closed
//do nothing
}
})
</script>
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I’m not a lawyer, but if your project depends on a single thing that’s licensed under GPL then your entire project must be licensed under GPL. At this point, it doesn’t really matter license-wise if you keep the licensed open-source files in the repo.
That was the legal side(again – I’m not a lawyer). From the technical side, you should try using a dependency manager – or at least Git Submodules – for those files. These will allow you to avoid storing those external files in your repository, make upgrading them to newer versions easier, and gives you control over which versions to use in your project. Those things introduce the work overhead of the initial configuration, but once you do that it’s super easy to use them for adding more dependencies, so if you have many dependency it’s worth the extra work of setting it up.
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