Plugins and Licencing

Discussions relating to plugin development, and the Jiwa API.

Plugins and Licencing

Postby Mike.Sheen » Thu Nov 05, 2015 11:20 am

Just a quick post on plugins and licencing.

By default any software published without an explicit licence agreement is automatically considered to be "No Licence".

"No Licence" means :
  • You are NOT permitted to redistribute the software
  • You are NOT permitted to sublicence the software
  • You are NOT permitted to modify the software
  • You ARE able to use the software for commercial use
  • You ARE able to use the software for private use

If you want to publish a plugin and DO want people to be able to freely modify, distribute and sell it then you must have the appropriate licence agreement included (as comments in the top of the code section is sufficient).

An example is the MIT licence:

Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>

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.


If you include the above licence in your plugin, then you permit others to sell and distribute your plugin freely without charge. Other popular licences can be found here.

All of the plugins published by Jiwa Financials are under the "No Licence" agreement, and unless any plugins you publish yourself have an explicit licence, then they are also considered to be "No Licence".

If you sell a plugin to anyone which was published under the No Licence agreement and you didn't write or own the plugin, then you have breached the licence agreement.

We, as developers for Jiwa Financials put effort in this forum into assisting others to learn and to evangelise the Jiwa platform. The licence granted for plugins provided does not allow you to resell the provided plugins. If what we have provided is part of a significantly greater work, then we are happy for you to use our provided plugins gratis. If not, then you are breaching the implied licence agreement.

Put simply: you can't just ask for stuff to be done here, or copy content from here and then charge customers for the work we did.
Mike Sheen
Chief Software Engineer
Jiwa Financials

If I do answer your question to your satisfaction, please mark it as the post solving the topic so others with the same issue can readily identify the solution
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