In this section, you will find answers to common questions about various aspects of Lire's licensing, e.g. questions which might arise if you plan to extend Lire with your own code.
Be aware that the LogReport team is very happy to include and maintain contributed code. We want to make this as easy as possible. See the first question. If you write code to be used with or as a part of Lire, please consider contributing it. This will not only benefit Stichting LogReport Foundation, but also you: the LogReport team will maintain and distribute your code, and will take care of handling bug reports.
Note Apply the usual disclaimers about the fact that this information doesn't represent "legal advice" and that you should consult an appropriate legal advisor for the definitive answers.
As with any software, it's a good thing to add a copyright notice to your code, like
Copyright (C) 2001,2002 Joe Hacker joe(a)example.org.
This makes it easy to find out who holds the copyright of this particular piece of code. Furthermore, you should add a license notice, like e.g. the modified BSD license which reads
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. 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
3. The name of the copyright holder may not be used to endorse or promote
products derived from this software without specific prior written
permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE
DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT,
INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL , SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES
(INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMI TED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR
SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PR OFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)
HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILI TY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT,
STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING
IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN I F ADVISED OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
or a referal to the GPL, which reads
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program (see COPYING); if not, check with
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html or write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111,
USA.
This makes it clear what people are allowed to do with your code. See the questions below for other licenses you could use. If you sent us code along with a copyright notice ans license notice as above, we have no problems licence-wise with your contribution.
The Stichting LogReport Foundation exists to develop, maintain and propagate tools as well as knowledge for log file processing and report generation (among other things). The Foundation's statutes mandate that all software owned by the Foundation should be made available under an open source license.
The chosen license was the GNU General Public License (aka GPL) because it was one of most widespread "open source" licenses and it would allow integration of many existing code.
You can find more about the Stichting LogReport Foundation on our website. Unfortunately, our articles of association are available in Dutch only at this time.
The short answer: no. As copyright holder of your contribution, you are free to choose whatever license terms please you. Be aware though that to be included in Lire, your contribution must be made available under terms compatible with the GPL. Examples of licenses that have compatible terms are the GNU GPL, the modified BSD license, the X11 license or the Clarified Artistic License (a list is on .
The more adequate answer is that it depends of the nature of your contribution. Contributions that cannot really be considered independent of Lire's distribution and thus have to be considered as "derived work" must be distributed under the GPL. This would include most patches to Lire's internals or to programs or reports included in Lire, but not additions of superservices, services or reports.
Yes. If your DLF converter doesn't include any code from Lire you are free to distribute it under the terms of your choice. Note that converters that use the publically defined DLF converter API include link to developer's documentation, aren't considered to be including or copying from Lire's code.
Remember though that in this case, your DLF converter won't be able to be distributed as part of Lire.
Yes. The Lire Report Specification Markup Language used to define those reports is publically defined and no patent is held over it, so you are free to choose whatever license terms please you for them.
Remember though that if your license terms aren't compatible with the GPL, your report specifications cannot be included in Lire's distribution.
Yes. Those for't protected by any patent so you are free to write software that read and write files in those formats if you find them convenient for your project.
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