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



Non Proliferation


We prefer that you don’t go out and choose yet another random license. In fact; if your license isn’t on the list below consider carefully why that is!

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.