Licensing FAQs

Licensing FAQs (Frequently Anticipated Questions)

Wait...Two Licenses?

You will encounter two licenses within Elements.

The whole project is licensed under GPL-3. This is necessary because I use a nifty library called 'mutagen'.
Certain files are licensed under the BSD-3. I'm allowed to do this under the terms of the GPL.

What Does This Mean?

Here's what this means for you.

Elements is, and forever shall be, Free and Open Source Software. Which is awesome.
If you want to fork Elements, or otherwise do something with the whole program's source code, your project must be licensed under the GPL-3.
If you only want to use some of the code in Elements, perhaps one file, or just a few lines of code, check the license at the top of the file...
- If the file is licensed under the BSD-3, you can use that file and all of its code however you like, so long as you comply with that license's pretty simple terms.
- If the file is licensed under the GPL-3, you can only use that file and its code under the terms of the GPL-3.

Why Are You Doing This?

I am an advocate, maker, and user of Free and Open Source software, and a card-carrying member of the Open Source Initiative. However, in the ongoing debate between Free Software and Open Source, I am squarely in the OSI camp.

I see proprietary software as having a role in a healthy software industry, and not as a wholly malevolent evil. Also, while I believe we need mechanisms that keep some code in the open source space, I do not believe it is ethical to force others to use a particular restrictive license such as the GPL-3 instead of other open source licenses on their own work; to do so is not true freedom, but rather forced sharing (which is technically the textbook definition of communism).

Since the GPL-3 does have a clause that allows one to include code under many other open source licenses, I am leveraging that to keep as much of my own code as possible truly free.