Use of sympy in Android app

[Ambar Mehrotra]

Hi,

I am working on a proprietary android app that uses sympy for computation purposes. We are planning to use sympy in the name of the app. What are the legal implications that I have to take care of to do this? Is it enough if I mention the sympy BSD licence in the app?

[Joachim Durchholz]

Am 27.08.2014 um 21:36 schrieb Ambar Mehrotra:
> Hi,
>
> I am working on a proprietary android app that uses sympy for computation purposes.

That's okay.

> We are planning to use sympy in the name of the app. What are the
legal implications that I have to take care of to do this?

You need to keep SymPy out of the name of the app; that would violate
the non-endorsement requirement of the license.

Non-endorsement is necessary, because if you endorse SymPy with the
consent of the SymPy creators, the SymPy creators might be held liable
for damages caused by your software (given the right legal complications).

> Is it enough if I mention the sympy BSD licence in the app?

In fact you are required to mention it. Essentially, those who already
decided to use the app need to know that SymPy is part of the software,
and they need to be able to see the license clause.
If you have an About screen or something similar, the typical wording
would be something like "This software contains code from the SymPy
project under the _New BSD License_", with a link to the license text.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, that's just my current best understanding
of the license SymPy is using.

[Ondřej Čertík]

Hi Ambar,

On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 1:36 PM, Ambar Mehrotra <ambar....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am working on a proprietary android app that uses sympy for computation purposes. We are planning to use sympy in the name of the app. What are the legal implications that I have to take care of to do this? Is it enough if I mention the sympy BSD licence in the app?

Awesome. Yes, you can do what Google is doing, e.g. in the Google+
app, if you go to Settings -> About Google+ -> Open source licenses,
there is a long list of projects that it uses and their licenses. So
you just copy & paste the sympy license in there.

Ondrej

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[Ambar Mehrotra]

Thanks Ondrej. 

But I am still in doubt about the name, because Joachim said(above) that it will be illegal to use the name.

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Regards,

Ambar.

[Ondřej Čertík]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 4:49 PM, Ambar Mehrotra <ambar....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks Ondrej.
>
> But I am still in doubt about the name, because Joachim said(above) that it
> will be illegal to use the name.

As to the name, the license says:

c. Neither the name of SymPy nor the names of its contributors
may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
without specific prior written permission.

so you can mention the name in the About page or in other documents to
your commercial program or on the page in Google Play.
But you should not use the name of SymPy to endorse your program, or
to promote your code if it was derived from SymPy --- i.e. if you
improve the sympy integrator (by modifying sympy sources), and start
selling (only) the binary, you should not call it SymPy.

Let me know if you have further questions. Post a link to your
program, once you have it, I would be interested to see.

Ondrej

> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CAE7cOrq48XooMjQ%3DEvwxbD43cNABVniEyQB1ypic%2BpJ00efzoQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Peter Brady]

I don't have anything to contribute to the topic of licenses and such but how would you bundle a python library in an android app?