Wednesday, September 26, 2007

interesting licensing

today i was searching the web for a Java library that would allow me to get the creation time of files* ... one of the solutions I found was this ... since my code would eventually be used for some open source application, I had to make sure that the owner of the library was OK with it ... the last words of the license said:
Non-military use only.
That is something that I've never seen before, and I like very much ... so much that I'm thinking about using it for my own code**.

* I was surprised to find out that on *nix systems the creation time of files is not saved ... weird
** I have to ask my boss if I can do this for the code I write at work too ...

4 comments:

andrewg said...

I'd advise against including it. Restrictions on area of use are explicitly forbidden by the DFSG and Open Software Definition. I quote from http://www.debian.org/social_contract :

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

aprilush said...

I had no idea, thanks ... so I guess it's going to be just for my own code ... if at all ... to bad, i really liked it

andrewg said...

It's perfectly legitimate to find out how it works and reverse-engineer it, so long as you don't copy any actual code... :-)

aprilush said...

I didn't use that code after all ... it's only for Windows ... i don't need that :)