Licensing Standards

There are two different types of licenses covered in this document - software licenses and content licenses.

“Inbound” means a license on someone else’s intellectual property, which we are using in some form. “Outbound” refers to a license we place on our own intellectual property.

Software Licenses

These licenses relate exclusively to source code and software libraries.

Inbound License Criteria

Any acceptable inbound software license must meet the following criteria:

Inbound Source Licenses (Short List)

The following licenses are already verified as meeting our criteria, and thus, are fully usable. This list is not exhaustive. Other licenses may be usable as well.

Note

The GNU Lesser General Public License v3 (LGPLv3) is usable if we are only linking against the LGPLv3-licensed library. Under no circumstances may LGPLv3 source code be used directly. We do prefer to avoid this license when possible.

Outbound Licenses

At this time, there are two licenses which we use for our code.

The BSD 3-Clause License is to be used for all code which shall be permissively open source. This supersedes our prior use of the MIT License. This license was selected for the third clause, which guards against implied endorsement.

The GNU General Public License (GPL v3) is used for libraries which we want to offer under a dual-license setup. Other GPL projects may be use GPLv3 code, but no other code may.

Open Source/Free Software Stance

MousePaw Media completely and publicly endorses the platform and goals of the Open Source Initiative, which we aim to further support and promote through our company’s activity. We want to encourage the widespread and dominant adoption of open source software and open standards, especially in the sphere of education.

We do NOT endorse the strict anti-proprietary stance of Free Software Foundation or said intent behind its licenses.

Content Licenses

These licenses relate to anything that is not source code, including but not limited to graphics, music, audio, text, and video.

Inbound Licenses

We can use any material which has one of the following licenses:

Outbound Licenses

We may wish to make some of our material publicly available via Creative Commons. When we do so, we use one of the following licenses.

Important

The licensing terms of any content must be approved by Anne McDonald or Jason C. McDonald! A large majority of our content is copyrighted, as that is essential to our ability to sell our products.

We use Creative Commons Non-Commercial No-Derivatives 4.0 (CC-NC-ND-4.0) when we want to make content freely available, but do not want it modified or used in commercial projects. This licenses allow teachers to use the content directly, as long as they don’t modify it.

We use Creative Commons Non-Commercial 4.0 (CC-NC-4.0) when we want to be make content freely available to use and modify, but do not want it used in commercial projects. This license also accommodates use in schools, but it additionally allows for the material to be used creatively.

We use Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY-4.0) when we want to allow anyone to use the content freely, for any project they want, even commercially. Because we rely so heavily on this license for inbound content, it is only fair that we give back some content as well.