Hello,
I’m creating a bunch of custom python scripts and custom nodes and was wondering about adding the traditional copyright information?
My initial thought was because Dynamo is OpenSource, copyright shouldn’t exist on anything we produce…but maybe it should…
What are all of your thoughts on the matter?
It’s certainly not uncommon for Open Source project to contain multiple libraries that are licensed separately. As far as I am aware Dynamo is licensed under Apache 2.0, which happens to be one of the least restrictive licensing schemes. Just to quote an excerpt from it:
Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.
However, there are some 3rd party libraries used in Dynamo, and these are licensed by a variety of different licenses from GPL to MIT. They all have certain restrictions, so please pay attention to that. Licensing controls how software is allowed to be used and distributed by everyone else other than its authors.
All, in all, I am trying to say, that it’s OK for you to place a special copyright on your components. Copyright stakes a claim that you are the author and owner of that particular work. I usually do that as well as combine it with the GPL 3.0+ license to make sure others know what they can do with my work. In short, and thanks to @Matt_Jezyk for pointing out that I have previously not been very clear about this, copyright states that I am the original creator while license gives others clear instructions about what is ok to do with my creation.
I hope this helps.
Thanks @Konrad_K_Sobon for such a detailed response, very informative! And it’s always a good thing to give credit where credit is due when borrowing other people’s code.
Note that Copyright and License are not the same thing. Here is a decent article describing these two and related concepts:
Thanks for the detailed response Konrad.
I think I have a better understanding on what is required and not required.
Cheers,
Matt