Chandler Licensing Plan

OSAF’s mission is to create and gain wide adoption for software applications of uncompromising quality using open-source methods. This implies that first and foremost we will make our software available free-of-charge under free / open source licenses for those operating exclusively in those worlds.

We also believe that our software may be of interest to commercial entities that will want to combine Chandler code with other software, which may be either open source or proprietary software. We want to encourage commercial use and distribution of Chandler since these activities may provide a wider market, additional functionality, more choices, and broader benefit for end users. Thus our software will also be available under a fee-based commercial license for those who wish to combine Chandler code with proprietary code. The potential revenue stream derived from the commercial licenses will be used to fund core development and maintenance of the open source code base.

More specifically:

GNU General Public License.

Chandler 0.1 through 0.6 is available as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Future versions will continue to be available under the GNU GPL. The GNU GPL does not allow code governed by the GPL to be combined in the same program as code governed by proprietary licenses or by many other open source licenses.

Commercial License.

In addition to the GNU GPL, future releases of Chandler will also be available under a fee-based license from OSAF. We have not yet developed the commercial license; at this early phase we have concentrated on code design and development.

Open Source Licenses.

We would like Chandler code to be available to open source projects that operate under licenses other than the GNU GPL. Therefore, we hope that future releases of Chandler will also be available under the terms of one or more generally accepted open source licenses; provided that if Chandler code is used to create a new application, the entire application is available under the terms of an approved open source license. This requires thought because some open source licenses (including the BSD, the Mozilla Public License and their variants) allow parts of an application to be governed under an open source license and other parts of the same application to be governed by proprietary licenses. So the need to define the scope of the software that must be governed by an open source license will be new to communities using these licenses. This is unlike the GPL world, where there is a long history of trying to make such distinctions.

If we can leverage this history and allow use under open source licenses, we will do so. If the effort to do so turns out to be all consuming we may need to reconsider.

This model allows OSAF to make Chandler available to everyone as free / open source software, thus meeting a fundamental OSAF goal. It also provides a revenue source to assist in OSAF's stability and long-term financial goals. We are indebted to those people and projects who have developed this model.