most recent 30 from http://fossfaq.com 2010-09-10T17:24:22Z http://fossfaq.com/feeds/question/26 http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/rdf http://fossfaq.com/questions/26/what-are-the-best-licensing-choices-for-cloud-providers-sdks-and-software Coté 2009-10-23T14:46:42Z 2010-09-03T02:22:59Z

<p>I talk with many cloud providers (be it any of the three asses, IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS) who're developing SDKs or tool-kits for developers to use to build on-top of their clouds/platforms. What are considerations for the licensing of these SDKs, and, thus, the best license choices? Do they even "need" to be open source?</p> <p>Examples here would be Force.com, Google AppEngine, Intuit's Partner Program, ZoHo, and so on.</p>

http://fossfaq.com/questions/26/what-are-the-best-licensing-choices-for-cloud-providers-sdks-and-software/51#51 James Dixon 2009-10-29T00:15:07Z 2009-10-29T00:51:20Z

<p>The first question to ask is 'what is the intent of providing the SDK?'. I assume that the intent of the SDK is to encourage developers to create add-ons for the service with the hope that the existence of third party add-ons will attract new customers. Within this there are more decisions about the intellectual property, licensing, and contributions:</p> <p><strong>Option 1:</strong> We are not concerned about IP issues of the SDK (as it is mainly an API auto-generated from the service WSDLs). We are not concerned about making money from the developers. We like the idea of developers helping us test and maintain the API. </p> <ul> <li>In this case a very permissive license such as BSD or Apache will be a good choice.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Option 2:</strong> We are not concerned about IP issues of the SDK (as it is mainly an API auto-generated from the service WSDLs). We are concerned about developers making money from the API - if they make money we feel we should receive some of that revenue. </p> <ul> <li>In this case a dual license (GPL/commercial) makes sense. Developers using the GPL license will have to provide their source code to anyone using their software - developers that don't like this license will pay you for a commercial (non-GPL) license to use the same API.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Option 3:</strong> We are not concerned about receiving coding or quality contributions from developers. We want to maintain control of access to the API - we want to know who is developing and what they are developing. We may or may not charge for developing using the API.</p> <ul> <li>In this case a proprietary API makes sense. You can charge for it or make it freeware.</li> </ul>

http://fossfaq.com/questions/26/what-are-the-best-licensing-choices-for-cloud-providers-sdks-and-software/108#108 bignose 2009-11-26T12:32:47Z 2009-11-26T12:32:47Z

<p>This would be a good topic to discuss in the context of the <a href="http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/" rel="nofollow">Franklin Street Statement</a>, and the autonomo.us community in general. I think that the interest of a free network for its users does require that service SDKs be free.</p>