Tips on applying for an open source license

Question

Hi,

I want to use Fisheye to host my codebase online in a secure manner. As my portfolio is open source (I publish code to it via a file explorer control and also parts of the site's code, plus the rest of the site code soon), I need a more scalable and organised manner of storing the code.

I checked out Atlassian Fisheye and its requirements to get an open source edition are as follows:

"Using an approved open source license"

I went to http://www.opensource.org/licenses to look at licenses. Has anyone got any experience of applying to this? What was the outcome?

Thanks

Answer 1

I'm not sure whether I understand your question right, but there is no application process for using an Open Source license. You just publish your content under one of the existing licenses, there is no need for approval from the license's author.

You just need to make sure the terms of the license you choose to use fit your intentions.

The most common way of putting code under a license is to add information about it into the comment header of each file, and/or placing a text file named LICENSE into the project's root.

An example comment header from the jquery.js file that actually applies two licenses. The user can pick which license they want to use the code under. (If you want to make totally sure, you can add a URL to the license text, or copy+paste the whole license, which is a bit of an overkill in most cases though.)

/*!
 * jQuery JavaScript Library v1.4.1
 * http://jquery.com/
 *
 * Copyright 2010, John Resig
 * Dual licensed under the MIT or GPL Version 2 licenses.
 * http://jquery.org/license

...

If you mean actually authoring an own license and having it endorsed by the Open Source foundation, I apologize. I don't know anything about that.