It's very difficult to figure out what license SceneJS is
distributed under. When you download SceneJS, there's no license
file, and there's no copyright block at the top of scenejs.js.
Doing a recursive case-insensitive search for "license" through the
unpacked download reveals that both identical copies (!) of the
Seymour plane are licensed under the SCEA Shared Source license,
and that some section of scenejs.js is licensed under "a BSD-style
license that can be found in the LICENSE file". (There's no way to
tell how much of scenejs.js is under that license, and the LICENSE
file is not shipped as part of the download.)
Then I looked at the web site. The front page has a "licenses"
link that leads to your git repository, which lists the GPL and MIT
licenses. OK; in my experience, if a project's source tree has
multiple license files, that usually means that some files are
licensed under one license and some under the other, with markings
(copyright notices in the files, README files in directories, etc.)
that explain which code is under which license.
So, let's try again with the recursive case-insensitive search
for "license", this time in the git repository instead of the
download. OK, there seem to be some components in lib/ that have
proper license information. The case of remote.concise.js seems a
little strange -- distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution
license, but has no attribution. But remote seems to be entirely
unused, so that's probably not a big problem -- it can just be
removed. The root directory build.xml says that "sourcefiles" is
supposed to include a file "license.txt". There is no file
"license.txt". The two identical copies (!) of the Seymour plane
are still licensed under the SCEA Shared Source license.
webgl-trace.js is licensed under "a BSD-style license that can be
found in the LICENSE file" -- OK, now I can reliably figure out how
much of scenejs.js is under that license, but the LICENSE file is
still missing.
And that's it.
And then I resort to randomly clicking on the web site, and I do
eventually find the FAQ entry that says "Is SceneJS Free?
You bet - under both the GPL and MIT licenses . Choose whichever of
these fits your needs best." Excellent news! This makes me happy.
But I'm sure it took me more than 10 minutes to find this
information, and it was only by chance that I found it at all. It
shouldn't be this hard. Even then, it's not totally clear. What do
you mean by "SceneJS" being under the GPL and MIT licenses?
Certainly not the entire SceneJS download, that has those two
identical copies (!) of the Seymour plane; and not the git
repository, that also has remote.concise.js, rhino, etc. I'm going
to assume that you mean that the src/scenejs directory in the git
repository, and the lib/scenejs.js file in the download, are
dual-licensed GPL/MIT (except for webgl-trace.js, which is
distributed under some BSD-style license with a missing LICENSE
file), which is good enough for me.
lindsay.kay (at xeolabs)