I looked up some examples and could not find the license wording for some of the standard meteor examples. Am I allowed to modify it to produce commercial software? If so, do I need to mention it? Where?
Which examples are you referring to? I believe most Meteor examples (as well as Meteor itself) are MIT licensed. Look in the root of the desired github repo for a LICENSE.txt file. For example, hereâs the LICENSE.txt for todos.
I was looking at localmarket.
Oh, good question then - Local Market doesnât have a license specified. I know it was built by MDG and Percolate (before Percolate joined forces with MDG), so @tmeasday might be able to answer this question.
If it doesnât have an MIT license thatâs an accident, we should add one. I wish github had the ability to set a default license.
So, whatâs the answer?
The answer is someone should add an MIT license file but Iâm on my phone so I canât do it right now.
About that. MIT license says:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
So, in case of a mobile app for which the consumer does not get the binaries, where would I put this notice?
And just to be sure, I am under no obligation to release the modified binaries, right?
There a great discussion about this here on Quora.
Right, you can modify anything you want and arenât required to release the changes (as long as you include the license/copyright info).
Check out the great choosealicense.com site for a quick breakdown of the various open source licenses, and their conditions/permissions/limitations.
PR submitted!
From MIT license:
âPermission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the âSoftwareâ), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:â
If I put that in my applicationâs license, it will grant the same permissions to my modified code; is there a way to grant permissions to do that with the original Local Market code but not my code? My client will probably want all the rights to my modifications.
The license doesnât say that your new code needs to be released under those terms, it just says you need to reproduce the original license in any copies of the software. Iâm not a lawyer, but our intention is definitely not to prevent people from using this code commercially, as far as I know MIT is a very permissive license.
How can it look like, in practical terms? How can I link to the original MIT license without releasing my modifications under the same license? Whatâs the most permissive example that would be satisfactory?
I think google is your friend here - search for how to use MIT code commercially. Note that Meteor itself is MIT licensed so youâre probably fine.