Allowed to create a binding with a "New BSD" licenced library?

[Christian S.]

Hello,

is it possible to create an (official) binding for weather stations that us the library "javahidapi" licenced under "new bsd licence"?
If this is allowed, I would split my binding into my weather station binding and a common I/O binding.

[Matt Watson]

While the New BSD is an extremely permissive license and does not prevent you from using, modifying, and distributing the library and any code that utilizes it.

However, I do not believe this would be allowed as a contribution to the official openHAB repo.  Please see: https://github.com/openhab/openhab/wiki/How-To-Contribute

By contributing code to openHAB, we therefore implicitly assume your approval to make it available under the EPL and that you have the right to give us the approval (i.e. the code does not contain any intellectual property that belongs to somebody else).

Code under the New BSD license does still claim copyright and thus the IP belongs to the copyright holder.  Ultimately what this means is, you are not legally entitled to grant openHAB permission to re-license the code under the EPL.  You would need permission of the copyright holder to do that.

So basically, you can make the binding and distribute it yourself completely legally.  However, the openHAB team will not accept your code as a contribution to the official branch unless they are given permission by the copyright holder to re-license the code.

Thats my perspective anyways.

 

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Matt

[Kai Kreuzer]

Hi Christian, hi Matt,

Yes, your explanation is correct, Matt.

Nonetheless, this is the „standard“ rule for source code contributions that applies, but of course there can be exceptions to the rule :-)

The usual case in such a setup is that we simply do not include source code of the 3rd party lib, but only the binary as a jar file (like e.g. https://github.com/openhab/openhab/tree/master/bundles/binding/org.openhab.binding.tinkerforge/lib). This jar then contains itself the license under which it is distributed. This of course only works if the license of the included jar is compatible with the EPL, meaning that it is allowed to be distributed together with EPL licensed code. For New BSD, this is the case.

Christian, would that work for you?

Best regards,

Kai

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[Christian S.]

Hi Kai,

that's good to know. So I can spend time to develop a binding that is compatible with the openhab rules. Do you think its a good idea to create a seperate I/O binding like serial binding? Or should I add it directly to the binding?

[Kai Kreuzer]

Hi Christian,

I am not familiar with weather stations that use javahidapi. If you think that it makes sense to have multiple different weather station bindings that all use the same library, you might want to put it in a separate io.transport-bundle. But I would guess that it is easier to go for a single binding, which might in the end support different (but similar) weather stations that are based on the same technology.

Best regards,

Kai

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[Christian S.]

Hi Kai,

thank you for your quick response. I will add the library directly. If needed I can split it later into a seperate binding.