[Chandler-dev] Licensing Questions

[Philippe Bossut]

Hi,

Brian Kirsch wrote:
> Is there a write up anywhere on our licensing requirements for 3rd 
> party API's? There are a number of libraries I am evaluating for the 
> Mail Service and licensing will certainly play a role in whether or 
> not they are used in Chandler. Can other licenses (GPL, MIT, etc) be 
> used in conjunction with the Apache license?
>
I had this discussion with Ted and Xun over the summer. Summary: it's  
hard to make a blanket statement, no matter what "umbrella" the license 
claims, there's no shortcut to reading the license agreement provided 
with the code. I know: that's precisely what you wanted to avoid...

As a general set of rules of thumb (note, these *are not* legal 
guidelines), we sort of agree on the following:
  1. Apache License: OK, of course
  2. GPL: not OK because GPL will require Chandler to be GPL.
  3. LGPL: OK as long as it does not require license compliance of 
Chandler. Also check with the owner of the code directly when using 
Python libraries licensed under the LGPL: since Python is not 
"compiled", the boilerplate terms of the license are ambiguous.
  4. BSD License: OK but read carefully
  5. MIT License: OK but read carefully

Again, not a set of policies, just rules of thumb: there are just too 
many variations out there to use hard fast rules.

Cheers,
- Philippe