Choose a license

[justinpenner]

What are my options for open-source licenses that can be applied to the TalkingLeaves project?

First, what does the GlyphsSDK license apply to?

Would I be required license this plugin under the same Apache 2.0 license used by the Glyphs SDK? I doubt that is the intention of the Glyphs team. The plugin templates in the SDK are presumably under the Apache license since it's applied at the root of the repo. But the general plugin template only contains 3 files:

• Info.plist, which only contains metadata about the plugin that I filled in. Neither the original file nor the current file would constitute a protectable work, as it's just some data in a structured format, not a creative work.
• plugin.py, which has no recognizable parts of the original template code remaining.
• plugin, an executable binary, which is unmodified, and is the only licensed piece of the template that remains in TalkingLeaves

So, under the Apache license, TalkingLeaves is only distributing the plugin binary file. We are not making a "derivative work" from anything. To comply with the Apache license, I'll add a copy of the license as well as the copyright notice from the SDK to the same folder as the plugin executable, and add a third text file explaining that the license and notice are applicable only to that file.

License options

Based on the above analysis, I should be free to choose any license (open source or otherwise, but I intend for this project to be open source), so long as the Apache requirements are met in regards to the plugin executable, which is the only file that isn't my own work.

• Apache 2.0
• MIT
• GPLv3

The above licenses are the ones I've often seen used in other open-source projects within the type community. I'll come back to this later to analyze the differences and look for more alternatives.

[justinpenner]

I added the MIT license to this project in 98b2435