While providing you with high quality software, we attempt to choose the most appropriate licensing methods, with simplicity, freedom and flexibility in mind, while keeping our interests.
If you find that some piece of code we write is mis-labeled, we would really thank you if you told us, so we can fix it as quickly as possible.
Software made available as copyrighted freeware is available free of charge, but its source code is not. Software that takes us considerable amounts of time or money to develop may be released in this form. Please remember that even though the software is available free of charge from this site, the fact that it's copyrighted means that it may not be redistributed by people or companies different from the Rapapaing Group without our express written permission.
Copyrighted freeware, as we release it, has no particular licenses. We believe that the fact that the code is copyrighted protects our interests completely. Be aware that all programs released under these conditions are released with total warranty disclaimers, which means that your use of them is done at your own risk and expense.
The BSD License is our favorite license, and you will find it in most of our projects. What it states is that you may use our code for anything you like, even if you want to compile it and sell the binaries without their source, and make millions out of it, we won't complain a bit. However, you may not remove the copyright notice, you may not use our name for endorsing or promoting without our written permission, and that there are NO WARRANTIES for anything licensed with this license.
The full text of the BSD-Style license template is:
Copyright (c) <YEAR>, <OWNER>
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
The GPL License and its related licenses are a set of licenses that give you the freedom to use and modify the software licensed under their terms. However, any derivative work must have its source code available, and it must also be licensed under the same license.
You will NEVER see such licenses in our projects. We want our open source projects to be as useful as possible, for ANYONE, regardless of how much money they have. We also discourage the use of this license for any open-source projects you develop.
Public domain is not a license. If we say a piece of code is released to the public domain, it means that you may do ANYTHING you want with it, you can even say you did it, and we won't complain (this doesn't necessarilly mean that they will believe you ^_^). You can even turn it in as homework, and we won't complain.
Releasing software into the public domain is quite a difficult thing to do. Not everything can be released into the public domain, because if a project uses software whose intellectual property lies into more than one person, each and every one of them must agree to do so, and that's not always an easy (not to mention positive) task.
We like releasing code into the public domain, but most likely, you won't see us doing it very often. Instead, we will use a very liberal open source license, such as the BSD-style license.
Even though you are free to do so, we strongly discourage the inclusion of our code released to the public domain, into code that will be released under a GPL or GPL-related license. Any other use is encouraged.