[License-discuss] Fwd: Yet another question about using libraries with different licensed in OSS

Henrik Ingo henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
Wed Jan 18 11:20:43 UTC 2017

On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Mikkel Bonde <mikbonde at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been maintaining a private piece of package on Github lately, that's composed from software that's MIT licensed and BSD2 licensed and my own source code.
> The original author(s) abandoned the project(s) and are not answering neither mails nor "issues" on Github.
> Am I allowed to publish this as OSS on eg. Github, and if so - is it enough to include the original licenses and give credit to original authors? I think it gets a bit hard to figure out whenever you mix licenses.

Yes: Taking over abandoned source code is one of the major points of
open source!

Some licenses mix well with others and some don't. The general point
is that if two licenses have contradictory requirements, you cannot
satisfy the combination of them. For the so called "short permissive"
licenses like BSD and MIT, the general consensus is that they can be
mixed with pretty much anything else.

The only annoying part when mixing two of them together is that you
must still correctly retain the license for each piece of code. So the
source code file that was originally BSD licensed must retain the BSD
license in its header, and likewise for the file that is MIT license.
You must just be careful not to mix them. For example, you may not
want to mix MIT code and BSD code into the same file, just to keep
things simple.

PS: I like your name! In my ancestral line some hundred years ago
there was a sequence of men called Mikkel. And they were of course
farmers. One was even called Mikkel Mikkelsson, as his father was
Mikkel too.

henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
+358-40-5697354        skype: henrik.ingo            irc: hingo

My LinkedIn profile: http://fi.linkedin.com/pub/henrik-ingo/3/232/8a7

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