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Scott Vickery

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Licensing

Post Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2011 1:35 pm
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I know the YUI library is distributed under the BSD license. There could be a better place for this question.

I am creating a commercial product that has a browser interface. I was planning on using YUI with the product. Is that product now a derivative of YUI? Would I have to allow access to the source code? If so, which parts of the source code? Obviously the browser code is visible to all, so, I am not too worried about that. But, what about the server side that feeds data to the browser?

Thanks,
Scott

Ryan Grove

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Re: Licensing

Post Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2011 3:19 pm
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Hi Scott,

I'm not a lawyer and this shouldn't be considered an official Yahoo! statement on the license terms, but here's my personal interpretation of YUI's license.

Products that use YUI are not considered derivatives of YUI. YUI's BSD license applies only to the YUI source code itself.

If your product is a web app that runs on your servers and serves YUI source code to the user's browser, then the only requirement is that the YUI JS and CSS files include the YUI copyright message and a link to the license. You can see an example of this at http://yui.yahooapis.com/3.4.1/build/yui/yui-min.js. If you're serving the files that are included in the YUI zip file, then this copyright message is already present and you don't need to do anything.

If you're running YUI's source through a minification step that strips out this copyright message, then you may need to re-add it before serving the files to your users.

If your product is a prepackaged app that's distributed to end users and includes YUI, then you just need to include a copy of YUI's license along with the YUI source code that your app uses.

Unlike some other open source licenses, YUI's BSD license isn't "viral", so it doesn't require you to distribute your own code under the same license. It only applies to YUI itself. You don't need to provide access to your source code that uses YUI. You're also free to make changes to the YUI source code as long as you don't remove the license or the copyright message, and as long as you don't use the name of Yahoo!, YUI, or its contributors to endorse your derivative product.

Scott Vickery

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Re: Licensing

Post Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2011 6:10 pm
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This is about what I thought. When you refer to more viral open source licenses, you are referring perhaps to GPL?

Thanks,
Scott

Ryan Grove

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Re: Licensing

Post Posted: Tue Nov 29, 2011 11:20 am
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Yep.
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