What license does designer/wizard-generated code fall under?

Question

This might be a stupid question but I just wanted to make sure...

If I incorporate code generated by the IDE (Visual Studio in this case) in my software, can I apply my own license to that code or is it subject to its own license?

Answer 1

The code that is generated by VS is based on your input so in fact you're just "compiling" from a higher level language (dataset designer or forms designer) to a lower level language, C# or VB. I don't think this is different than a compiler that generates machine code or IL based on your source-code.

Answer 2

I am not a lawyer, but I believe that generated code is basically the same as any other program’s output based on your input. In this case the output is generally considered to be owned by the application’s user (you) and not the application’s developer.

The GPL FAQ covers a similar topic:

Is there some way that I can GPL the output people get from use of my program? For example, if my program is used to develop hardware designs, can I require that these designs must be free?

In general this is legally impossible; copyright law does not give you any say in the use of the output people make from their data using your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert his own data, the copyright on the output belongs to him, not you. More generally, when a program translates its input into some other form, the copyright status of the output inherits that of the input it was generated from.

So the only way you have a say in the use of the output is if substantial parts of the output are copied (more or less) from text in your program. For instance, part of the output of Bison (see above) would be covered by the GNU GPL, if we had not made an exception in this specific case.

You could artificially make a program copy certain text into its output even if there is no technical reason to do so. But if that copied text serves no practical purpose, the user could simply delete that text from the output and use only the rest. Then he would not have to obey the conditions on redistribution of the copied text.

Answer 3

In the general case you should read carefully the licence that comes with your wizard/code generator.

In the vast majority of cases, the code produced by a wizard (or a compiler or a pre-processor, etc) is a completely separated entity from the generator itself and no restriction is applied to it.

There are cases, though, where copyrighted code could be inserted in the generated code, for example as a set of functions to support the generated code.

Also in this case most of the code generators state that that piece code is licensed under very liberal terms. Trying to limit code modification and redistribuition or to impose run-time royalties has demonstrated itself to be a very poor business model. I've seen it used by old program-generators on a mainframe for example, but not much since then.

So, in 99.9% of the cases you are ok with doing whatever you want with the generated code, just read the fine print to cover the remaining 0.1%