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

Mikkel Bonde mikbonde at gmail.com
Wed Jan 18 11:57:10 UTC 2017


Ah, that's very nice! I had the same understanding, that you could
generally mix'n'match BSD and MIT licenses as long as you kept licenses and
credited original authors.

In the specific case, the 2 different libraries will for sure be phased out
by time, since their implementations are old and not really well
designed/coded - but I might as well publish my ongoing work since we've
been using this in production for quite some time, and hopefully I could
join forces with the rest of the community instead of being a one-man-army
- and it's a great improvement over the abandoned software which now has 22
open PR's and 200+ issues on Github - mostly without *any* feedback.

Thank you very much for your answer @Henrik!

PS: Ah, that's quite funny - I'm from a "farmer-family" as well :-D

On 18 January 2017 at 12:20, Henrik Ingo <henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Mikkel Bonde <mikbonde at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I've been maintaining a private piece of package on Github lately,
> that's composed from software that's MIT licensed and BSD2 licensed and my
> own source code.
> >
> > The original author(s) abandoned the project(s) and are not answering
> neither mails nor "issues" on Github.
> >
> > Am I allowed to publish this as OSS on eg. Github, and if so - is it
> enough to include the original licenses and give credit to original
> authors? I think it gets a bit hard to figure out whenever you mix licenses.
> >
>
> Yes: Taking over abandoned source code is one of the major points of
> open source!
>
> Some licenses mix well with others and some don't. The general point
> is that if two licenses have contradictory requirements, you cannot
> satisfy the combination of them. For the so called "short permissive"
> licenses like BSD and MIT, the general consensus is that they can be
> mixed with pretty much anything else.
>
> The only annoying part when mixing two of them together is that you
> must still correctly retain the license for each piece of code. So the
> source code file that was originally BSD licensed must retain the BSD
> license in its header, and likewise for the file that is MIT license.
> You must just be careful not to mix them. For example, you may not
> want to mix MIT code and BSD code into the same file, just to keep
> things simple.
>
>
> henrik
> PS: I like your name! In my ancestral line some hundred years ago
> there was a sequence of men called Mikkel. And they were of course
> farmers. One was even called Mikkel Mikkelsson, as his father was
> Mikkel too.
>
>
> --
> henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
> +358-40-5697354        skype: henrik.ingo            irc: hingo
> www.openlife.cc
>
> My LinkedIn profile: http://fi.linkedin.com/pub/henrik-ingo/3/232/8a7
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-- 

Mvh,
Mikkel Bonde
Reberbansgade 52 2. mf
9000 Aalborg

Kontakt:
#: 28 68 01 33
@: mikbonde at gmail.com
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