A few notes on copyright issues

This section is my attempt to do the right thing and comply with the terms of the licenses that cover the many pieces of free software on which this website runs. To be fair, while I usually have no trouble understanding code, the legal documents accompanying it seem far more a matter of interpretation (despite code often being executed by interpreters).

With two exceptions, all “covered works” are thus by either the GNU GPL (in both version 2 and 3 incarnations) or the MIT License, of which the latter doesn’t seem (to me) to impose any use restriction or distribution obligations on me. The two exceptions are an Apache Style License (ASL), which appears almost equally permissive, and the Terms of Service of the Google Maps APIs, which are basically implemented automatically through the APIs themselves.

That leaves the GNU General Public License, which I find slightly less penetrable in what concerns its applicability to software running on webservers and generating webpages. But here I rely on the FAQ section at gnu.org:

A company is running a modified version of a GPL’ed program on a web site. Does the GPL say they must release their modified sources?
The GPL permits anyone to make a modified version and use it without ever distributing it to others. What this company is doing is a special case of that. Therefore, the company does not have to release the modified sources.

(Of course I can only hope that what applies to a “company” also applies to a single individual.) But just in case, I am giving a brief list of all software used and what license the individual “works” are covered by.

WordPress and Carrington Blog theme

They are both released under the GPL, WordPress under v2 while Carrington’s copyright notice just consists of this (indecisive) link. Obviously, the code has been modified and extended by me for this website, but as per the above I don’t think that brings with it any further obligations. That said, I’ll be happy to supply anyone with the source code if you ask me for it, I just don’t have the time to actively support any distribution.

JavaScript and PHP libraries and scripts

The following scripts are used either by the original WordPress, Carrington Blog, JetPhoto Server or OpenZoom distributions or by my modifications of them:
Prototype, script.aculo.us, Simple HTML DOM, DD_belatedPNG (an Internet Explorer PNG fix), SWFObject and swffit. They are all licensed under the MIT license.
IE PNG Fix 2.0 Alpha 4, another Internet Explorer PNG fix, is licensed under the GNU Lesser GPL v2.1.

JetPhoto Server

JetPhoto Server is licensed under the Apache Style License (ASL). This requires me to include a notice with attributions

“within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear.”

Here is the the full text of the license.

OpenZoom and Overlay Extension

OpenZoom is released under the MPL 1.1/GPL 3/LGPL 3 trilicense with the added requirement that I add a context menu item with attributions. Here is the the full text of the license. It includes attributions to the included third-party ActionScript libraries Tweener (license: MIT), Tweensy (MIT), SWFWheel (MIT or GPL) and Robert Penner Easing equations (BSD).

My implementation also makes use of the Google Maps API for Flash.

The Working Group iPhone icons

My OpenZoom-based multiscale image viewer makes use of a couple of icons by The Working Group, which are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) license.

Horizon Photoblog Template

Finally, I am also using a (modified) template for some of my JetPhoto-powered photo albums, which was originally designed by Scott Craig from cancerbox.

Content and Media

For all written content, images, movies and diagrams, unless otherwise stated:
Copyright (c) 2006-2010 Arno C. Hammann. All rights reserved.