Licensing policy

From Atheme

This is the licensing and copyright policy of the Atheme project.

Preamble

Atheme's policy on licensing is fairly simple. We strive to maintain software freedom. Software freedom is defined as the right to study and make derivitive versions of the original work. Software freedom is also defined as the right to distribute the original work, and optionally charge for this service.

Various components of the Atheme platform exist today only because people believe in this concept of software freedom. As such, our licensing policy exists to protect this freedom as much as possible.

Licensing and Copyright Policy

Copyright is used to protect software made available under our licenses. The use of copyright ensures that the license is able to be enforced in court. However, it is up to the author of the software to enforce their copyrights. We can provide assistance with this in the form of education and the licenses we use to protect components of Atheme's platform. The Free Software Foundation refers to this process as Copyleft.

At present, we have several licenses that are used for various parts of the Atheme platform:

• The 3-clause BSD license: This license is the least restricted licensing option available. It allows for relicensing under a more restrictive license and incorporation into another product with a more restrictive license as long as the copyright acknowledgement is retained.

• The 3-clause BSD license + viral copyleft requirement: This license is derived from the BSD license, but requires mandatory copyleft. Any copyleft license can be used in place of this license, but non-copyleft licenses may not be.

• The 3-clause BSD license + non-commercial viral copyleft requirement: This license is derived from the BSD license, but requires mandatory copyleft. Any copyleft license can be used in place of this license, but non-copyleft licenses may not be. In addition, it forbids commercial use of the work licensed under this license. We recommend avoiding this license, but understand that it may be desirable depending on the nature of the work.

• The GNU Lesser General Public License: This is similar to the BSD with copyleft license that we use. It is recommended to use the BSD license or BSD with copyleft license instead of this license, however, some external code is licensed under this.

• The GNU General Public License: This is the most restrictive license allowed by our policy. It is the standard GPL with or without the version upgrade option. Again, we recommend using the BSD with copyleft license instead of this unless there is a specific reason not to.

Licenses not compatible with the Licensing Policy

This is an informal list of licenses not compatible with our licensing policy. Usually licenses are deemed incompatible due to providing a provision for a transition to a non-copyleft license. In this case the traditional 3-clause BSD license is normally compatible with the license in question, as it does not require copyleft.

• The Mozilla Public License: The MPL is not compatible with any of the copyleft licenses used by Atheme. The MPL allows for binaries to be redistributed under a seperate, non-copyleft license, and allows for the project to change the licensing of the code at any time they wish. As such, the MPL is generally incompatible with our licenses, excluding the traditional 3-clause BSD license.

• The Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL): The CDDL is not compatible with any of the copyleft licenses used by Atheme. The CDDL allows for binaries to be redistributed under a seperate, non-copyleft license, and allows for the project to change the licensing of the code at any time they wish. As such, the CDDL is generally incompatible with our licenses, excluding the traditional 3-clause BSD license. Typically, the CDDL covers OpenSolaris code, and as such, more free implementations are available from the various BSD distributions.

• Shareware, Charityware, etc: Most licenses which fall under this description are not compatible with our copyleft licenses. In most circumstances, the licenses may be compatible with our traditional 3-clause BSD licensed code.