React-native-router-flux: Licensure

Created on 20 Sep 2016 · 15Comments · Source: aksonov/react-native-router-flux

@aksonov I noticed you're using a BSD-2-Clause. One of requirements of the license is:

Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

This seems to indicate to me that any software using this router and later placed in the App or Play stores must include your copyright notice in their store descriptions. Would you agree or disagree?

question

Source

ghost

Most helpful comment

react-native-router-flux is now under MIT license. :tada:

charpeni on 23 Sep 2016

❤2

All 15 comments

I'm not one of the owners of this project, nor a lawyer, but you can look in facebook & whatsapp "about" screen, there you can see a link to all the open source projects with their licenses, that they use in the app..(there's practically an endless scrolling there..).
I think this licenses requires exactly that..

atlanteh on 22 Sep 2016

I was afraid of that. Any chance on switching to MIT? There are probably hundreds of apps going into the store right now which break the licensing policy.

ghost on 22 Sep 2016

MIT requires publishing their license as well :)
https://tldrlegal.com/license/mit-license
What we did was just using a module to crawl all our dependencies, make
sure they are permissive, and copy their license content to one big file..
Obviously it's not enough, as there are modules that are MIT without
license file & copyright notices.. But at least we satisfy 90% of our
dependencies tree..

On Thu, Sep 22, 2016, 21:12 Josh Habdas [email protected] wrote:

I was afraid of that. Any chance on switching to MIT? There are probably
hundreds of apps going into the store right now which break your licensing
policy.

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atlanteh on 22 Sep 2016

MIT is _permissive_ and the copyright notice only needs to go on the source code, not necessarily called out in binary distributions. I give credit where credit is due, but creating an in-app about page in the binary distribution with BSD licenses doesn't feel professional.

ghost on 22 Sep 2016

Ok, so I guess you're right. But how many people do you think are going to press on a "licenses" link inside your "about" page, just to see a long list of project you're using? Facebook does it, Whatsapp does it. Chrome does it. Nobody cares, but it's there..
I do however agree with you that this license makes many people break its policy.. However, the oweners have put a lot of work in here and they probably want to be acknowledged, even if it's in a dark place in the app..Of course if they decided to change it to MIT, it could be cool :)

atlanteh on 22 Sep 2016

Not to pick apart language, but where fallacies are concerned:

Facebook does it, Whatsapp does it. Chrome does it.

Argumentum ad populum

But how many people do you think are going to press on a "licenses" link inside your "about" page, just to see a long list of project you're using

Denying the antecedent

Once enough people are using a library, and if they're breaking licensing requirements any savvy attorney could do the work for them IMO.

ghost on 22 Sep 2016

agreeing with @jhabdas - For us to promote this library in source code is one thing. Having to ship a full license with every app we use it on, is a pain. Let's get a license change on this. I think their intention was credit where credit is due. But not to "Nascar" every app that uses it.