License?

[jminor]

What license is this source code available under?

[TeddyDD]

"By default" everything you publish is considered All rights reserved
https://choosealicense.com/no-license/

Technically this makes all external contributions to Storyboarder illegal 😉

When you make a creative work (which includes code), the work is under exclusive copyright by default. Unless you include a license that specifies otherwise, nobody else can use, copy, distribute, or modify your work without being at risk of take-downs, shake-downs, or litigation.

Do you guys have plans to choose any FOSS license? It seems that you are not going to monetize Storyboarder (according to your website) so I guess that would be good way to go.

[boredstiff]

Hey @jminor !

"license": "ISC",

is what's listed in the package.json.

[setpixel]

Hi guys, I really haven't thought about the Lic much. TBH, It's been a while since I've read up on it. Do you guys have any suggestions?

[boredstiff]

MIT https://tldrlegal.com/license/mit-license is probably going to be the most popular, I'd say.

[jminor]

MIT, BSD and Apache licenses are all common and permissible, which make them more agreeable for collaboration with a wide range of use cases. The guidance at the site @TeddyDD linked (https://choosealicense.com) seems to match what I've encountered previously.

[TeddyDD]

@setpixel I'd suggest you to take a look at https://choosealicense.com/

You have to be careful when choosing license since it might hard or impossible to change it afterwards (example: you have to have CLA signed by all contributors to re-license copyleft project under GPL). If you don't wan to deal with then best bet is BSD or MIT license.

I know all that law stuff sucks. Personally I'm artist not lawyer but feel free to ask any questions, I'll help if I can 😃

[ideasman42]

Hi, I reported #588.
While ideally you might want to choose the license that perfectly fits your own preference.
It's generally least hassles to choose a license thats used by code you use/inter-operate with.
If the answer to what license your project+dependencies uses is "it's complicated" - it becomes tedious for someone to check if there are any gotcha's/compatibility issues.
This can be hard to avoid entirely - maybe you want to use code from OpenToonz for example... which has a different (but ISC/MIT compatible) license. Nevertheless, avoiding too many different licenses prevents unnecessary confusion surrounding your project.

Suggest to check the licenses use by code you depend on and other libs in NPM.

From a quick check, 2 of the 3rd party deps use MIT (which is a popular license and functionally equivilant to ISC).

[TeddyDD]

ISC is nice license, but key: value in package.json is not enough. As you can see in tldr legal you have to include the full text of license in modified software. Witch is impossible if Storyboarder does not have license text in repo 😉 I think instead #589 you should create LICENSE.txt in the repo root with ISC license text

Copyright <YEAR> <OWNER>

Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.

It's better to keep license file separated from readme since then it's easier to package your program.