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Change license placement/usage [5.2.1]

Change license placement/usage [5.2.1]

Owned by Alex
Jan 18, 2015

License type change

We're using GNU/GPL license right now, that enforces anyone who uses In-Portal to use same GNU/GPL license on their product. This is a serious obstacle for commercial software, that will be using In-Portal, since it surely won't be sharing it's code with others. For that reason I suggest to change current license to other one (e.g. listed on http://choosealicense.com/licenses/ website).

My personal preference is "BSD 3-Clause", because it doesn't give as much freedom as "MIT" license does.

License placement

Right now we have a license copy-pasted in almost every file. This has several drawbacks:

  1. we need to change every file, when importing project for usage with Intechnic developed projects, that are using In-Portal
  2. year in copyright message need to be changed in every file every year

I'm proposing to choose other license distribution format:

  1. place short reference on top of each file with software name and place where to look for a license
  2. place actual license code in LICENSE file, that we're shipping with In-Portal anyway

Proposed license format:

/**
 * This file is part of the In-Portal CMS.
 * For the full copyright and license information, please view
 * the LICENSE file that was distributed with this source code.
 *
 * @copyright Intechnic Corporation
 * @link http://www.in-portal.com/download.html
 */

Depending on a file we'll be adding extra @package line to the license.

Current license format in In-Portal:

/**
* @version $Id: index.php 14244 2011-03-16 20:53:41Z alex $
* @package In-Portal
* @copyright   Copyright (C) 1997 - 2009 Intechnic. All rights reserved.
* @license      GNU/GPL
* In-Portal is Open Source software.
* This means that this software may have been modified pursuant
* the GNU General Public License, and as distributed it includes
* or is derivative of works licensed under the GNU General Public License
* or other free or open source software licenses.
* See http://www.in-portal.org/license for copyright notices and details.
*/

Current license format in Intechnic:

/**
* @copyright   Copyright (C) 1997 - 2009 Intechnic. All rights reserved.
* This software is protected by copyright law and international treaties.
* Unauthorized reproduction or unlicensed usage of the code of this program,
* or any portion of it may result in severe civil and criminal penalties,
* and will be prosecuted to the maximum extent possible under the law.
* Any tampering with this code, components, environment, mechanisms,
* or databases by any third-party not explicitly authorized by Intechnic,
* shall irrevocably and unconditionally void all warranties,
* in which case all further repairs, regardless of nature, timing or origin
* or problems, will be paid for in full by Customer.
* See http://www.intechnic.com/msa/ for full notices and details.
*/

Related Tasks

INP-1323 - Getting issue details... STATUS