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maven-2nsisfork

How to fork opensource project without violating licence?

I want to fork Maven NSIS plugin http://mojo.codehaus.org/nsis-maven-plugin/index.html at BitBucket. Codehous project seems to be dead. How should I behave to craete legal fork of it?

Solution

  • Unfortunately(1) doesn't claim what licence it has, but after checking out their code from svn, the header in the file NsisCompileMojo.java says:

     * Copyright 2008 Codehaus
 *
 * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
 * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 * You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

    The Apache licence is quite permissive; you can easily fork of your project, but need to keep the original copyright notices of the original authors. More details can be found a Wikipedia(2) (apache.org seems to be down at the moment).

    But long story short: Fork.

    Edit: One more hint: The Freedom Task Force, an institution of the Free Software Foundation Europe, will be able to help you if you still have legal doubts: http://fsfe.org/projects/ftf/