Can I use Grails in proprietary software? [closed]_问答_开发者

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I'm trying to figure out the licensing consequences of using Grails as the base for closed-source non-free software. This would be a server product that is downloaded and installed. Users would not have the right to redistribute it or run it as a hosted service.

Grails and Groovy themselves are cool: they're licensed under ASF 2.0 which is great. However, Grails has a billion dependencies and I'm going crazy tracking them all down.

Grails can generate a list of software that your project depends on by running grails dependency-report. I'm going through that list of dependencies, BUT:

Many of the libraries do not list their licenses. So I'm going to each and every library and figuring out its license.
I'm guessing dependency-report doesn't list all the transitive dependencies (libraries that THOSE libraries include, and so on) because they aren't fully specified in Ivy.

Has anyone gone through this exercise before? Just knowing the end result would be a HUGE help. Actually having a list of all the dependencies and their licenses would be a MASSIVE help.

Thanks!

I spent a day tracking down all the Grails 1.3.7 dependencies. Here's the gist:

Grails itself has the nice friendly ASF license
Some subcomponents use more restrictive licenses
However, none of the subcomponents use what I'd call a "showstopper" license like GPL
However, some people WOULD consider a few of the licenses to be showstoppers, most notably the LGPL used by Hibernate.

Lawyers are scared to death of LGPL because it's easy for developers to make a mistake that forces the entire system to become open source. Things that would trigger this are: modifying any little bit of the LGPL source code, copying any little bit of the source code into your product, or linked to the GPL software "statically" rather than "dynamically" (that's a long discussion).

Because of this, some software companies and purchasing departments have rules forbidding its use.

Here's the subcomponents with more restrictive licensing than ASF. LGPL's the worst:

Hibernate (LGPL)
A bunch of javax stuff (like activation and mail) under CDDL 1.0
org.beanshell BSH is SPL
javassist is MPL

Everything else is licensed BSD, MIT or ASF. Those are fine.

I should think that all of the Grails dependencies will be fine for use with commercial software since SpringSource sells commercial support for it. You could try asking them about licensing issues as they probably have it all figured out.

Can I use Grails in proprietary software?

Ask Oracle, Grails is running on Java. It might be restricted through higher rights so you might need to get a license from Oracle first to create your specific software with it. Better ask the vendor of the platform first.

[...] Java specifications are proprietary technology that must be licensed directly from the spec lead under whatever terms the spec lead chooses.

See Apache foundation resigns from Java community

Next to that it depends on the license of the Grails package. It's released under ASF 2.0 as you write. I would furthermost assume that this license applies to the whole package as the website suggest, but you must check the whole source code on your own if you really want to rely on this, because the software comes with no warranty. In case the Grails folks made a mistake in licensing it falls back to you in a larger share if the information they provided was wrong.

Keep in mind that you are asking about creating your own proprietary software. That's a job on it's own, your business, and you need to take care for anything legal then on your very own.

You can never rely to any comment unless it's one of a lawyer that is acting behalf of yourself for real.

There is one plugin that might be helpful to check upfront visible licensing terms: http://www.grails.org/License+Plugin

The ASF 2.0 license is a free software license, so even if you consider it "friendly" with all the attitude you show, keep in mind that it has termination clauses as well as the GPL / LGPL. Those are to protect the freedom of the software.

The license at the Grails web site will surely have an answer.