Overview

The Codehaus only accepts projects that have business friendly licenses.

A business-friendly license is a license that supports the full use of a project in a commercial, possibly closed-source, environment. The GPL is not considered business-friendly, as closed-sourced projects may not take advantage of projects using the GPL.

The GPL has a decidedly hobbiest/academic/free-as-in-liberty bias to it.

The LGPL (and GPL+CE), on the other hand, allows for full usage of the project in a closed-source product, and is thus considered to be business-friendly. Even more lenient licenses, such as the ASL, MIT, X11 and BSD licenses are definitely business-friendly.

Codehaus is pragmatic, we use closed source software if it's better than the opensource alternative



Preferred Licenses



We strongly believe in non-proliferation of licenses. Having a limited set of licenses helps us (and our users) understand the legal interactions between components of their systems.

As such, if you don’t have a license or you have the ability to relicense (i.e. “you” own the intellectual property - or can get all IP holders to agree) then we recommend you choose one of the following licenses for your project.



Other Permitted Licenses


Prohibited Licenses

  • GPL (there is 1 project using the GPL at Codehaus - Esper - this was due to a miscommunication, and we have made an exception for this project for pragmatic reasons)
  • Public Domain
  • Shareware
  • No license

Licence Violations

Contact Codehaus Support if there is a licence violation (that you can't resolve directly with the project).

Codehaus takes a hands-off approach to the licencing and control of projects hosted on its servers. While this means that projects may violate licencing restrictions; Codehaus will take action once a violation is brought to our attention, or we discover it by other means.

Clarifications / Updates

Contact Codehaus Support if you believe a license is missing or there is something unclear about our policy.

Note our views on non-proliferation; we would prefer you to use one that we have explicitly listed.