CodeIgniter License Inquiry

[eluser]electBlake[/eluser]
Hello Fellow Igniters,

I am reaching out to you today in hopes of finding some information about CodeIgniter, Ellislab's intentions and the CodeIgniter Core Dev Team.

My name is Blake and I am the lead PHP Developer for the Open VULab web application - a remote usability testing tool. Our open-source application is part of the Fluid Project - an international community with its team based in various academic institutions.

After much research and an unwillingness to subject my community and incoming developers to the learning curve of one of the "baked" framework alternatives, I've decided to recommended CodeIgniter to my community for use within the Open VULab project. As such, our community as well as our legal consultant have some questions about the license that is distributed with CodeIgniter.


1. We are curious as to why EllisLab opt'd to use a "custom" license rather then use an open-source standard license. (BSD, MIT, etc)

2. Are all contributors to CodeIgniter from the EllisLab team? If you have outside contributors to CodeIgniter, do you ask them to sign any sort of Contributor License Agreement?

3. One of our specific concerns is that EllisLab Indemnifies themselves very strongly within the CI license, which in itself is understandable but within the CI license the language does not speak to any of the efforts EllisLab (and/or the CI Core Dev Team) might have put into avoiding any patent or copyright issues that codeigniter itself could create. This is the primary concern that was brought up our legal consultant.

In addition any insight into the intent of the CI license and EllisLab's process in creating it would be greatly appreciated and will help us understand if we can use CodeIgniter.

If you have any questions about the research I've done, reports I've written on CI, or the community/project I represent feel free to ask.

Sincerely Thanks,
- Blake

[eluser]MtheoryX[/eluser]
There has already been discussion, in detail, about the license.

http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-legal...39307.html

The issues are not completely coherent with what you raised; however, the indemnity issue is present. Take a look at that discussion, and search around a bit for other discussions.

All this said, I do know the project was forked at least once before, and said forking was compliant with the license (after a little logo and naming debate). I mention this because if you ever have an issue with the development of the framework...you can always fork it AFAIK.

[eluser]electBlake[/eluser]
Thanks for the share! I'm passing it around my communities mailing list asap.

Just as a note, my use of "we" is referencing the group of developers I represent. I in no way assume that my concerns are indicative of all CI developers

[eluser]MtheoryX[/eluser]
I think that a few other issues have now been highlighted, following an IRC discussion...

The requirements and rights when modifying core files is unclear. Can the license be extended to include my own license on modifications I make? If so, what if the modifications essentially change the behavior of an entire class? How much of that class is considered "modified" at that point?

And if you can link your own changes to your own license, what happens when those two licenses collide?

It's been a bit since we've seen some serious discussion on the specifics of the CI license, and I welcome all others' input and questions as well.