Hi all, After conquering many hurdles along the way, it looks like the company I am a part of is willing to release a good part of the source code we own as open source software. Before we do that though there are a couple of outstanding issues that I was hoping someone on this mailing list could clarify. We want to use a BSD 3-clause and immediately publish the source code on a public code repository allowing contributions from users. The questions that have arisen are the following:
1) Clause 2 requires users that distribute the software in binary form to reproduce the copyright notice. Since the holder of the copyright notice is the very same company that makes the source code available to them, would it be possible to selectively waiver this obligation to a particular set of users without infringing on the Open Source definition or the BSD license itself? If the answer was negative, would including the existence of such a waiver in the license itself preclude it from being considered an open source software license? 2) When accepting contributions to the source code repository from external sources, I have seen that is sometimes customary to include an additional copyright line to the license text included at the top of the source file, crediting the person or company that contributed the new code or file. Would then the waiver mentioned in question 1) be in violation of the additional copyright holder(s)' rights? 3) When reproducing the copyright notice in binary distributions, must one parse all source code files to find out all of the contributors' names and include them in full? Or is it enough to simply provide a LICENSE file that only credits the original author (the company that made the source code available originally) so that users of the source code can simply reproduce that particular file in their binary distributions? Thank you in advance, Zluty _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
