Home/ Questions/Q 515417
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-13T07:37:34+00:00

I am building my own web app, and there are open source code out

  • 0

I am building my own web app, and there are open source code out there that would be useful in my reducing my development time.

For now, I plan to develop in closed source, but opening the source code when the code is mature can be a possibility. However, for now, I’d like to know the possible (legal) issues in using open source code (esp reusable apps) in my platform?

I understand there are various licenses, such as Creative Commons, BSD, Mozilla licenses. Could you guys possibly elaborate in general about them and others?

URLs would be useful as well!

Thanks!

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In general:

    BSD – do what you like with it, just don’t advertise your product as being endorsed by the authors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses

    MIT – do what you like with it

    Creative Commons – Depends on the type (see below)

    (1) Attribution – Do what you like with it, but acknowledge the author(s)

    (2) Noncommercial – Do what you like with it, but don’t sell it

    (3) No derivative works – You can use it as long as you don’t modify it or create a work derived
    from it

    (4) Sharealike – Distribution of this or derivative works must comply to the original license

    (5) Combinations of (1) to (4)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_licenses

    Mozilla public license – It’s complicated http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/mpl-faq.html

    Apache license – Do more or less what you want with it (with some restrictions)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License

    GPL – Do whatever you want with it, but if you modify it and distribute it in any way, you MUST
    release the source code under the GPL. If any of your code contains GPL licensed code, your entire source code must be released under the GPL

    LGPL – Mostly applies to libraries, you can link against a library or include the source code in your application as long as you do not modify the source code. Modified code must be released under the LGPL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License

    Please note, IANAL.

    • 0