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.
- Apache Software License 2 (preferred license)
- Ruby license (for Ruby based software)
Other Permitted Licenses
- MIT
- BSD
- Mozilla Public License (MPL)
- LGPL 2, LGPL 3
- GPLv2 + CE (Classpath Exception)
- Open Software License (OSL)
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.