Distributing jquery licence in commercial software

Question

I’m building a commercial web application that uses jquery. I think I need to use the MIT licence for jquery because the application is commercial. When I looked at the MIT licence in Wikipedia it says:

“It is a permissive license, meaning that it permits reuse within proprietary software on the condition that the license is distributed with that software”

My question is how do you distribute the licence in a web application? Does the user have to accept the licence the first time they use the web site? Or do I include the licence in an about page?

Answer 1

As I understand it, when you are displaying a web page, you're not actually distributing the software. There are exceptions to this, but none that apply to the MIT license.

I believe when you include jQuery in your web page, there is a reference to the license in the jQuery source. That should be sufficient.

Here is the reference in the source code, from the minified version of jQuery:

Copyright 2010, John Resig
 * Dual licensed under the MIT or GPL Version 2 licenses.
 * http://jquery.org/license

If you are distributing the app as a commercial application to be executed on the customer's servers, I would include a full copy of the MIT license and the unminified source code for jQuery with the application as separate files.

There are not any terms that the end user has to agree to, unless they decide to distribute the jQuery files themselves.

Answer 2

See http://jquery.org/license

You don’t have to do anything special to choose one license or the other and you don’t have to notify anyone which license you are using. You are free to use a jQuery project in commercial projects as long as the copyright header is left intact.

"copyright header" referrer to header lines in the jquery javascript file.

Answer 3

John Resig, original author of jQuery and still the copyright holder, says:

You are completely free to bundle jQuery with any commercial application you choose, just leaving that notice intact with the jQuery file itself. That's it!

That quote is from this forum post in the jQuery forums.

Which is basically what it says on the jQuery license page:

You are free to use a jQuery project in commercial projects as long as the copyright header is left intact.

So as long as you don't remove the copyright header from the jquery-XXX.js file you're including with your application, I think you're in good shape.

Does the user have to accept the licence the first time they use the web site?

No.

Or do I include the licence in an about page?

I'd certainly include a shout out to the project, but I don't think it's a requirement of the license.

I am not a lawyer. I don't even play one on TV.

Answer 4

As the previous answers have already said, you should make sure you still distribute the header at the beginning of the file.

I would suggest making sure that you're not using an automated JavaScript minification tool that would strip all comments (and thus strip the licence header) amongst other techniques for reducing the size of the file.