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chartjs / Chart.js

Simple HTML5 Charts using the <canvas> tag
https://www.chartjs.org/
MIT License
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MIT license for PDFs generated #11655

Closed bramvbilsen closed 5 months ago

bramvbilsen commented 5 months ago

Documentation Is:

Please Explain in Detail...

I am using Chart.js to generate dashboards with analytics for clients. One of those clients asked to add functionality to export a PDF of such a dashboard to distribute. Does that PDF need to include a copy (or part of) the MIT license included in this project (chart.js)? I understand that it should be included in the codebase, but I am specifically referring to the generated PDFs which might be distributed/printed/sold.

My apologies if this is not the place to ask this! My first thoughts were StackOverflow, but I felt like it didn’t quite belong there. So feel free to move this if need be! 😊

Your Proposal for Changes

It’d be nice if we could add some examples of allowed use cases with caveats (if any) in the docs.

Example

No response

stockiNail commented 5 months ago

@bramvbilsen AFAIK Chart.js is not producing any PDF. You can export the chart in PNG or JPG therefore I think you you are using another lib to create the PDF. If MIT license is needed also for images add to PDF, you can use the license published in the repo, I guess.

bramvbilsen commented 5 months ago

@stockiNail I understand that Chart.js itself does not generate PDFs, but the charts might end up in a PDF (or image format). But at its core, the charts, wherever they end up, are still created with Chart.js. I do not know if that makes any difference?

As the generated media is not part of the software anymore and the MIT license states the following:


The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

I believe the created charts can be used without any mention of the license/notice/chart.js. But I wanted to confirm this :)

LeeLenaleee commented 5 months ago

I have no background in law so I am not totally sure but I don't think you have to include it in your pdf, a lot of sites also use chart.js and don't have the licence listed on the site.

Afaik there have never been an incident because chart.js was used and no license reference was provided

etimberg commented 5 months ago

My understanding is that you do not need to include the license for chart.js since the PDF contains no code. The canvas -> image process is done by the browser via getImageData which I don't think causes licensing problems.

The styling of the charts produced is an artifact of the supplied data and configuration which is outside the scope of the chartjs project and thus the licensing

bramvbilsen commented 5 months ago

@etimberg I was under the same impression! Thank you all for your takes on this.