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I'm trying to make a library that will be used by other developers. I want to obey the "don't re-invent the wheel" principle and and I also want to make the deployment a matter of dropping a single .dll into the bin folder.

So far, I've chosen an dual MIT/MS-PL license. Is there anything stopping me from compiling other MSPL/MIT licensed code directly into the same assembly as my own?

Am I worried about nothing?

If this is a legit concern, should I go add a licence/copyright header to each file before I add other code to my code base, since there won't be a nice tidy assembly to delineate where the code came from?

Also, I will add the header for you so you can get to writing the answer faster: "You are not a lawyer, you are not giving legal advice, I should fork over my hard earned money to a profession I detest to resolve questions like this instead of asking for free advice"

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MIT license lets you do pretty much anything you want with the code - just include the MIT text in the file.

If you are allowing the redistribution of the code as a dynamically linked library anyway you could also use the LGPL.

What do you want to achieve with the license? Do you want to force people to feed changes and fixes back to you or do you want them to have the most freedom to reuse the code?

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  • I don't really care if anyone subsequently contributes their improvements to the community. What I do want to make sure is that if I use someone else's open source library by including the source code files with mine and compiling all of it down to a single file, that it doesn't violate that license. LGPL sounds like it would be the exact sort of license where I couldn't do that, i.e. I would have to leave the LGPL .dll as a separate file. MIT and MSPL on the other hand are quiet on the issue, so it is less clear was is allowed.
    – MatthewMartin
    Dec 11, 2011 at 22:56
  • MIT is a permissive license, other than a few details (outline in the link) you can do what you want with it and so can your users
    – Martin Beckett
    Dec 11, 2011 at 22:58

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