Licensing of connectors

Help
1

Hello Speckle Team,
I have a question regarding the licensing terms of a (new) connector. If a company develops a new connector are they allowed to license it to a certain extend? The code will be open-source.

I found the following references in your docs but I am not sure if they apply to the connectors:

What does open source mean?

It means that you are free to take our code and run away with it! Really! Speckle is licensed as Apache 2 so you are free to study, modify, redistribute and commercialize any parts of it.

This means that you can totally deploy your own Speckle server without ever having to depend on us!

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

2. Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free,

irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or

Object form.

Thanks. Matthias

2

The Apache licence is such that it is fully permissive. An example pertinent to your question: you fork the Speckle Revit and Rhino connectors to change the behaviours to record some in-house proprietary data between teams related to your company. There is no obligation to share that code change as open source or contribute it back to the Speckle project.

Giraffe made a connector to Speckle servers using the REST and GraphQL APIs. There is no obligation to reveal this source code to us or anyone else.

Where we will get interested is if you start to distribute MathiasSpeckle Connector for Blender as this would implicitly use a trademark name. Normally, this too will be allowable to a degree but we’d want to discuss this.

You can take our connectors code, adapt it, compile it distribute it as your own. But why would you want to?

2 Likes