[License-discuss] Fwd: Yet another question about using libraries with different licensed in OSS

[Alex Rousskov]

On 01/18/2017 08:50 AM, Massimo Zaniboni wrote:
> On 18/01/2017 16:17, Alex Rousskov wrote:
>> compatible licenses like BSD and MIT, the easiest thing to do is to
>> acknowledge their existence in one place (e.g., NOTICE or COPYING file),
>> under a general "this Software contains code licensed under the
>> following licenses:" header.

> So probably to comply 100% with the requirement of the license, if you
> have 10 source files, with the license header in them, for reusing the
> code in these files, you need to extract all the different authors, and
> list them in some place as you said, and they must be acknowledged also
> from the binary application in some LICENSE/CREDIT menu. So for every
> author of every source file, you should mention them.

Yes, and I can provide all that information in one document (and
"dialog") distributed with (and "displayed" by) Software. Many projects
do exactly that. The fact that 100 authors placed their code in 1000
source files is irrelevant here; I can remove the license text from
those source files and still comply with their licensing terms by other
means because their generous license allows me to do that.

Again, the license applies to code/software, not some "source file" with
ASCII art containing badly copied license text at the top. There are
many ways to associate code with the copyright/license statement. The
more precise that mapping is, the more expensive maintaining a correct
association becomes. A centralized list of authors and licenses is a
practical approach for most open source projects that incorporate code
from many authors using many simple licenses.

Alex.