What Licenses Do My Widgets Fall Under

Filed in archive E-Commerce on June 18, 2006

Within the last couple years I've found it much easier to try and find existing JavaScript widgets than try and build my own. One site that I've used on a few projects as a resource for widgets is WebFX. To be more specific I've used their Sortable Table and XTree widgets on a few project and found them both easy to bend to my will and implement afterward.

That was, however, till my most recent project. On this project I have a technical manager that has actually done this stuff before and he is overseeing our latest creation. A few weeks ago he told me that my Sortable Table widget could not be used on this specific project. The reason being was that it falls under the GPL license. Wow, I thought to myself. I need to read these things a little closer to figure out what is going on here in the world of Open Source licenses.

So I tried to read about these different licenses and interpret them the best I could. Anyway the problem seems to be with GPL. From what I gather people using software distributed under GPL on commercial software projects have issues with it because they must freely share any changes made to said software to the public.

Luckily for me WebFX seems to have changed its license to Apache Software License 2.0. Again, from what I gather it seems to be a bit more lenient than GPL for commercial software use.

Whatever the case I think it is interesting that somehow I am suppose to fill my regular role as a developer and than switch hats and take on the role of lawyer. I need to do this in order to protect a large company from financial harm because developers on a project chose the wrong widgets to use based on the Open Source license they were distributed under. It all gets tiresome but in this case the devil is truly in the details.