Greetings, everyone! I’m slowly ramping up to a major commercial Web project that absolutely requires beefy support for extreme concurrency. Eventually, if successful, the project will entail billions of concurrent threads in hundreds of servers across the planet. I discovered the Erlang family some time ago as part of a wide-ranging investigation of development tools but have only recently returned to examining it in much greater detail over weeks of research. I’m not sure where to find the answers to a few simple questions, though. Sadly, my Google-fu is weak on this topic. What are the licensing implications of adopting Elixir/Phoenix as a primary development platform?
I’m not certain how to put this. The commercial project will be driven by a mixture of core proprietary server & Web code and supporting open-source projects, such as the Mozilla browser family (Firefox, Waterfox, Pale Moon, et alia). All of the proprietary code will come from my own efforts with no borrowing from outside libraries. Needless to say, the (commercial) project will carefully, meticulously respect the lines between the various licenses for the aforementioned open-source projects. I understand that this can get complicated. But if IBM, Google, and numerous other commercial companies can do it, then it’s doable by definition.
Furthermore, what about LiveView? Who owns it? Is this a private project by one developer, Chris McCord, at one company, DockYard? What’re the licensing terms?
Apologies in advance if I’ve failed to be clear or have mixed up concepts. The project’s practical implications have seriously overloaded my limited mental faculties. A few wires may have shorted out. My magic smoke may need time to regenerate. -_-
Any casual thoughts, suggestions for further research, or direct links to useful FAQs or resources are much appreciated!
Ah, thank you! That’s very helpful. I see all three references are to GitHub. In the future, I’ll look first to GitHub for licensing information. LiveView seems very interesting, and the MIT license is perfect! Obviously, the project team would reach out to Mr. Chris McCord before undertaking any commitments. We can discuss potential development cooperation and appropriate remuneration with him at that time.
In any case, the implications of the commercial project itself are sufficiently wide-ranging that many months of preparatory work remain before it’s time to form a dedicated advisory team, let alone work up slide decks for investor meetings. -_-
I understand that your comment is not legal advice and that only a lawyer can provide advice on the full implications of Apache License 2.0 and the MIT License for commercial enterprises in regard to the Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView triad.
Just remember that you can use even GPL if you aren’t delivering the software to the end user. In other way as long as you do not distribute application itself and it is web application.
there is a package, licensir which tries to help you understand what your license dependencies are. Also it’s worth considering that commerical and closed source is a use-case the ecosystem is incentivised to support, as hex.pm offers private code repository service.
