General questions regarding open-source licensing

Posted by ndg on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by ndg
Published on 2013-06-18T18:07:16Z Indexed on 2013/06/24 22:31 UTC
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I'm looking to release an open-source iOS software project but I'm very new to the licensing side of the things. While I'm aware that the majority of answers here will not lawyers, I'd appreciate it if anyone could steer me in the right direction.

With the exception of the following requirements I'm happy for developers to largely do whatever they want with the projects source code. I'm not interested in any copyleft licensing schemes, and while I'd like to encourage attribution in derivative works it is not required.

As such, my requirements are as follows:

  • Original source can be distributed and re-distributed (verbatim) both commercially and non-commercially as long as the original copyright information, website link and license is maintained.
  • I wish to retain rights to any of the multi-media distributed as part of the project (sound effects, graphics, logo marks, etc). Such assets will be included to allow other developers to easily execute the project, but cannot be re-distributed in any manner.
  • I wish to retain rights to the applications name and branding.

Futher to selecting an applicable license, I have the following questions:

  • The project makes use of a number of third-party libraries (all licensed under variants of the MIT license). I've included individual licenses within the source (and application) and believe I've met all requirements expressed in these licenses, but is there anything else that needs to be done before distributing them as part of my open-source project?
  • Also included in my project is a single proprietary, close-sourced library that's used to power a small part of the application. I'm obviously unable to include this in the source release, but what's the best way of handling this? Should I simply weak-link the project and exclude it entirely from the Git project?

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