131

If yes, what precautions should I take?

tshepang
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Harry Joy
  • 2,227

4 Answers4

154

With an MIT/X11-licensed product:

  • you CAN:
    • re-use the code freely for your own use,
    • re-use the code freely for non-commercial AND commercial re-distribution, whether in source or binary form.
  • you CANNOT:
    • claim authorship of the software,
    • thus you cannot attack the original author for using or publishing his original version.

So, yes, you CAN use MIT/X11-licensed plug-ins in your commercial application.

MIT/X11 is basically a simple contract that says:

  • Person or company X created Y.
  • Y belongs to X, but X is granting you the right to use it and do whatever you want with it.
  • X cannot be held accountable for anything that goes downhill with what you do with Y.
haylem
  • 29,005
22

The MIT license allows you to

use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software

as long as the license text (copyright notice and disclaimer)

shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Where does this license text have to appear?

This text should appear where the software is used or copies are made. For example, you should keep the license text publicly visible in any JavaScript, or left as a comment in any PHP files. This is enough, even if the comment in the PHP file isn't publicly visible, because:

If I use MIT-licensed software server-side, do I have to display the copyright notice or disclaimer?

Having MIT-licensed software work server-side (e.g. as a PHP script) to produce a HTML page is not redistributing the software, unless the program includes itself in its output.

Community
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Ben
  • 221
12

The full text of the MIT License can be found here.

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like you can

deal in the Software without restriction

even so far as

distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software

provided that

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

Again, I'm not a lawyer, but you might fulfill that condition via comments in all pages or scripts that use the MIT licensed plugin or an Acknowledgments page.

David Ruttka
  • 3,215
7

Every opensource licence to date (MIT too, a BSD-spirited licence) allows you to use the software on a commercial web site (and that's part of the reasons for the extreme OSS propagation in latter years) with some notable exception. Those exceptions are:

ZJR
  • 6,361