In putting up a copyright notice for a new project, I had occasion to review the Dojo license. I am not a lawyer.
Just so there's no misunderstanding: I have been using Dojo in my projects and my clients projects for over a year. I get a better quality product with Dojo. I support Dojo.
I ran into two issues with Dojo's BSD license:
* Dojo is released in source and compiled forms. However, the "compiled form" is not a "binary form", in the usual sense of that term. The BSD license refers to "binary". Should this be changed to "compiled" for Dojo?
* The "no-endorsement" (third) clause was left in. This may not have been intended. In respecting this clause do I need to be careful to never mention "Dojo" when speaking about my product, lest this be construed as using the name of the Dojo Foundation to promote my product? Who are the contributors? I am constrained not to use their names, so who are they?
Here's a note from http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php:
Note: On January 9th, 2008 the OSI Board approved the "Simplified BSD License" variant used by FreeBSD and others, which omits the final "no-endorsement" clause and is thus roughly equivalent to the MIT License.
The MIT license also does not mention "binary".
Regards,
George
PS - could I use the poetic license on my project?
(c) 2005 Alexander E Genaud
This work ‘as-is’ we provide.
No warranty, express or implied.
We’ve done our best,
to debug and test.
Liability for damages denied.
Permission is granted hereby,
to copy, share, and modify.
Use as is fit,
free or for profit.
On this notice these rights rely.
This is part of the reason we offer AFL as well
Put simply, the Dojo Foundation isn't interested in enforcing licensing constraints, so either way you're totally OK. We've stated often and publicly that we would put Dojo Foundation work in the public domain if we felt there was sufficient legal precedent to allow it (sadly, there's not). The Foundation does need to make a credible case that we've been enforcing our licensing, but given that we also license everything under the Academic Free License (which allows for explicit sub-licensing), there's a simple assumption that if you omit the advertisement requirement from your site/app, you're simply complying with those terms and violations of the AFL are hard to imagine assuming good-faith use of the toolkit. The oft-cited goal of the Foundation's licensing policies are to effectively and permanently give away our code. That's the whole reason we added the BSD license in the first place: it's something that everyone understands and gets "most of the way there" WRT our licensing goals:
http://dojotoolkit.org/about/license
We probably can't really justify making modifications to the BSD license for our use since its primary value is in that it's well-understood. The "Simplified BSD license" will likely be our best option some time in the future when it's as well accepted as the common BSD license. That said, if you include the copyright notice in *some* location in your app (not necessarily up-front), we'll assume BSD usage and there won't be any ambiguity for anyone.
As for the "no endorsements" clause, we'd be incredibly grateful for you to mention that your applications use Dojo and we *absolutely* support that. It's part of the reason that we've pursued a policy of explicit "genericide" WRT project trademarks. What it does prohibit (by our reading) is your suggesting that IBM or SitePen or Sun are supporting or endorsing your project or product by virtue of their involvement in the project. You can absolutely say that you're using Dojo, that you love it, that you're an active participant in the project (if you are), and that you're working with us to improve things. The line is really only crossed were you to suggest that your product/project is a Dojo Foundation project or that they receive explicit support from the Foundation or other contributors to the Foundation without that being demonstrably true. You can likely say that these other firms also use Dojo, but how that is couched is likely the only ambiguious part of this. Worst case, just ask if what you're doing crosses the line.
Regarding "binary" or not, it's pretty much not applicable here. Everything we do is "source" in some form (excluding bundled Jar files which have other, clearly-stated licenses). I don't htink this has been tested in any court, but the JavaScript that we produce isn't meant to be obsfucated or in any other way transformed with the intent to prevent understanding. Assume "source" licensing for all of Dojo.
And yes, you can use the Poetic License with any Dojo Foundation product.
Thanks for the insightful question. Don't hesitate to ping me if you have other licensing concerns, and good luck!
Regards