Licensing question

[scriptjs]

How can Samsung relicense iotjs under Apache license and not provide attribution or include MIT licence anywhere to identify its sources or attribute node's authors. The majority of this code is directly derived from node.js

[lemmaa]

@scriptjs , It's my mistake. I'm going to fix it on #327. Could you please explain me about MIT license related parts in detail? Thanks! :)

[scriptjs]

@lemmaa Hi there. Thank you for your reply.

The MIT is a very open license but explicit in what it requires. While I believe there is no requirement to include the MIT license reference in the head of each file, it must at least be included in the software for attribution, copyright and compliance.

I would say this. If you are going to use license headers in each file, you should include the MIT info in files that you have modified or used – or at least a reference to where the details can be found in the software to comply.

When you create installers and such, you should ensure that users are aware that your software includes software under this open source license and either include the direct MIT license info or point to where this information can be found in the software, even if you modified the code and re-licensed the combined work.

[mikeal]

This is a little trickier than the initial issue claims.

MIT allows you to "sublicense" the work, so you can add the Apache-2 license to your redistribution of this software. You can also choose to only distribute any modifications you make under the Apache-2 license.

However, for the code you are re-distributing from the MIT code base you must retain the MIT license in the distribution, which you aren't doing. This is in the MIT license:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

So you're in violation of the license agreement there.

In addition to this, you've removed the original Copyright attribution text, which is a big no-no ;) You'll want to put "Copyright Node.js Contributors" at the top of any file you took from Node.js. It's fine to leave a second line about Samsung's copyright as it pertains to any modifications you may have made.

If you want to remove the attribution you should seek the permission of the copyright holder, which in this case is the original contributors. Failing to do so has some legal implications I'm not entirely clear about but the MIT license doesn't explicitly state that changes to attribution revoke the license however the Apache-2 license does :)

[mikeal]

Just a followup, I am not a lawyer and do not represent the legal opinion of the Node.js Foundation. If you want a legal recommendation from the Node.js Foundation we can ask for one.

[lemmaa]

Hi @scriptjs, my question was 'Which part of node.js codes that IoT.js referenced are under MIT license, you think?' From license notice of node.js at https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/LICENSE I can't figure it out. IoT.js referenced API codes, mostly written in JavaScript, from https://github.com/nodejs/node/tree/master/src, and it looks like licensed under Node.js License as following.

Node.js is licensed for use as follows:

"""
Copyright Node.js contributors. All rights reserved.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to
deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the
rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or
sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS
IN THE SOFTWARE.
"""

This license applies to parts of Node.js originating from the
https://github.com/joyent/node repository:

So, I just added license notice to LICENSE file. Under condition of

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

And in my personal decision, according to licence notice in https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/LICENSE, MIT license is related to one of dependencies exclusively maintained in https://github.com/nodejs/node/tree/master/deps, which we didn't used. So, even in that case, do we need to include it to license notice? Looking forward your help. Thank you in advance.

Thank you @mikeal , too! :)

[mikeal]

my question was 'Which part of node.js codes that IoT.js referenced are under MIT license, you think?

I think he is referring to https://github.com/Samsung/iotjs/tree/master/src/js

All of the Node.js original source is under an MIT license.

[lemmaa]

@mikeal Thank you. I asked to node.js community. (nodejs/node#5021)

[yichoi]

@scriptjs, @mikeal,

Hi. Recently I found that this issue is still open. So I read the guide in this comment, and added some missing license in PR #419. So now,

• We're not modifing any of original copyright lines.
• If we are making local modification, our copyright line is added below original license.
• We will include copyright notice and MIT license in the documentation for any hardware we ship with this code running on it.

Do you think we can close this issue by now? Or please let me know if there are something more to correct. I'll fix it right away.

[yichoi]

@daeyeon Could you please check the feasibility of FOSSA for our repo?