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Licenses and Open-Source Technology

A project log for Juliet Magic Mirror

An IoT device that displays the weather, news, time, and can play music: all on a beautiful, clean interface

matt-lagarenneMatt Lagarenne 04/18/2016 at 04:370 Comments

Since this project is open-source and will be completely open for anyone to download and use, it is important that I get the documentation and licensing correct so that the open-source community is also able to help contribute in an easy, well-understood way. To that end, here are the sources that I am currently using:

weathericons.ttf - SIL Open Font License

Comme-Thin.ttf - SIL Open Font License

python-forecast.io - FreeBSD License

pygame - LGPL

Since the project is early on in development, this is all that I have. In order to comply with the above licenses, I need to do a couple of things if I want to include them in my source code:

  1. Include the SIL Open License text file in my source
  2. Include the FreeBSD clause with the forecast.io source
  3. Explain to users how to download pygame somewhere in my README

This means that I have complete control over the license that I choose provided I do the above things, since none of these are copyleft and require me to adapt a certain license.

Since I want the project to be as open as possible and for people to be able to submit their own modules to expand the platform, I am going to choose to also use the FreeBSD clause, since it protects my code from simple copying without credit. This means that people are able to modify it and use it to make their own modules but are free to use their own licenses if they wish if they choose to make a module. To that end, I also do not think that it is necessary to force people to use a certain license. As long as I have my code covered, I am safe from unauthorized copying.

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