MWR Code licence about drozer HOT 11 CLOSED

The 2 things that are most important in the license:

1. No one can use Mercury to unlawfully hack devices
2. No one can sell Mercury or use it for commercial gain

The reason why we went with this license instead of a standard license is to ensure flexibility for the future. If we use a fully open source license then it is hard to sell "addon packs" for Mercury if we ever wanted to that.

Mercury will always be a free and open-source tool that accepts and encourages community contributions :)

from drozer.

You could always double license the code and have a fully open source license and a commercial friendly license.
In the current license, there is no guarantee that the community could create a derivative work based on mercury if MWR ever decide to stop open-sourcing it.

from drozer.

I agree with you and we will look deeper into the licensing if that would make contributors sleep easier at night :)

from drozer.

This license is complex. You are definitely losing contributors because of it.

If we use a fully open source license then it is hard to sell "addon packs" for Mercury if we ever wanted to that.

This is simply not true with a BSD or Apache style license.

from drozer.

Development is pretty much MWR exclusive these days... i have stepped out, as did pretty much all non-MWR devs that have contributed to the project in the past.

from drozer.

'1.No one can use Mercury to unlawfully hack devices'

And they care about the license telling them not to because..? :)

from drozer.

The v2 license was supposed to provide contributors with assurance that Mercury would remain an OSS project. If it is, in fact, unclear then this is a problem.

We are actively reviewing the licensing terms, and hope to provide a solution in the next few days.

from drozer.

If you want to be open source, just choose an open source license! There are plenty out there, GPL, Apache, BSD... just. pick one that fits your needs. Nobody needs a lawyer to understand how those licenses work, which is not true for that awkward license that you have.
Stop reinventing the wheel!

from drozer.

I don't think there is any need for hostility in this discussion ;)

We understand your point and appreciate all of your feedback to us. Hopefully once this has all been resolved we can get some sweet contributions to this project :)

from drozer.

See d413390: as of v2.1.1 Mercury is under a 3-clause BSD license.

from drozer.

That's great news! Thanks.

from drozer.