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He's talking about using bits and pieces of Chromium's infrastructure in other programs, but didn't address open source licensing at all. I haven't looked at it

by mwfunk 13y ago

He's talking about using bits and pieces of Chromium's infrastructure in other programs, but didn't address open source licensing at all. I haven't looked at it myself, but according to Wikipedia, Chromium's source is licensed under: "BSD license, MIT License, LGPL, MS-PL and MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-licensed code, plus unlicensed files". This is all fine, but anyone using this code needs to make sure they understand what license(s) the code they are using is under and what the terms of those licenses are. Just because it's open source doesn't mean you can just do whatever you want with it; even less restrictive licenses like BSDL might have conditions like the advertising clause, and you should always be aware of any copyrights in the code and be sure to preserve them. That said, I'm sure the Chromium source is a great resource- just a strange and important omission from the article. I would also suggest that anyone looking for a platform-independent runtime check out APR (Apache Portable Runtime): http://apr.apache.org http://apr.apache.org. It's lower-level than some of the Chromium libraries mentioned in the article (it would be equivalent to the "base libraries" block in the "Chrome Development Platform" figure), but sometimes that's all you need. Plus, it's already designed as a library for other applications to use, there's no need to repurpose anything like you might have to do with the Chromium sources.

magicalist 13y ago
It's not too complicated. Everything with a different license is in src/third_party. Everything outside of that is under a BSD-style license. Need to watch your dependencies, but they aren't too hard to spot (and part of checking into third_party is a license check, so they're all well documented). You can see them all if you go to about:credits in Chrome/Chromium.
paulgb 13y ago
I don't see how it would be different from using any other MIT-licensed code in your project. The Apache License doesn't seem any less restrictive than MIT at first glance? Edit: I assumed the entire codebase was multi-licensed, it looks like you're saying that different parts have different licenses, which does sound like a headache.
- sanjeevrad 13y ago
  The core Chromium codebase itself uses the same license (a BSD-style license). Chromium itself uses certain other third-party libraries that have different licenses.

by mwfunk 13y ago

magicalist 13y ago

It's not too complicated. Everything with a different license is in src/third_party. Everything outside of that is under a BSD-style license. Need to watch your dependencies, but they aren't too hard to spot (and part of checking into third_party is a license check, so they're all well documented). You can see them all if you go to about:credits in Chrome/Chromium.

paulgb 13y ago

I don't see how it would be different from using any other MIT-licensed code in your project. The Apache License doesn't seem any less restrictive than MIT at first glance? Edit: I assumed the entire codebase was multi-licensed, it looks like you're saying that different parts have different licenses, which does sound like a headache.

sanjeevrad 13y ago
The core Chromium codebase itself uses the same license (a BSD-style license). Chromium itself uses certain other third-party libraries that have different licenses.