Licensing

[haggi]

Hi,

I'm a bit unsure. I think it is time to add some licensing information to my files. Now I have a problem because my GPL, MIT, BSD licensing knowledge is almost not existing.

If I see it right, one of the more important differences between GPL and MIT is that if anyone makes a tool public which is based on GPL, he has to open the sources whereas the MIT products can be result in a closed source product. Is that correct?

So I have a problem with some of my code:

I use appleseed for my mayaToAppleseed plugin. But I do not extend appleseed. So do I have to license my sources under MIT license because appleseed is licensed under MIT?
Or another renderer I create a plugin for, Luxrender, is GPL based. Do I have to license this plugin under GPL?

Or can I choose whatever I want as long as I only include the API files but do not modify any of the original code? As you see I am a bit confused, maybe anyone here has a better understanding of this whole topic and can give me an advice?

[François Beaune]

I'm far from being a license specialist.  As far as I know, MIT and BSD licences are similar; the MIT license is somewhat simpler and shorter.  Both are very permissive and allow usage in commercial, closed source products.  GPL is more restrictive as it requires anyone using the code to release their modifications as open source.

I'm really not qualified enough to answer the question of mayaToAppleseed licensing.  I would suggest you ask your question on http://programmers.stackexchange.com if it doesn't already have the answer somewhere (there are many licensing questions there, make sure to check them out first).

Franz

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[Nathan Vegdahl]

> GPL [...] requires anyone using the code to release

> their modifications as open source.

That's not quite accurate. If you only ever use/modify the code
in-house, you don't have to distribute the source code. The GPL
basically ties software to its source code, so that _if_ you
distribute a binary to someone, you _also_ have to make the source
code available to that same someone (also under the terms of the GPL).
But if you keep the binary to yourself, you can also keep the source
code to yourself.

It's a subtle but important distinction.

Personally, I prefer BSD and MIT style licenses. But I can definitely
see why some people choose GPL-style licenses.

--Nathan

[Est]

I think you can't use GPL, because you are linking with Maya libraries 

and that's incompatible with the GPL.

You can use MIT / BSD if you want a permissive license. Or you can 

use MPL if you want a less permisive one.

Est.