Overview

The Codehaus only accepts projects that have business friendly licences.

A business-friendly license is a license that supports the full use of a project in a comercial, possibly closed-source, environment. The GPL is not considered business-friendly, as closed-sourced projects may not take advantage of projects using the GPL. The GPL has a decidedly hobbiest/academic/free-as-in-liberty bias to it. The LGPL (and GPL+CE), on the other hand, allows for full usage of the project in a closed-source product, and is thus considered to be business-friendly. Even more lenient licenses, such as the ASL, MIT, X11 and BSD licenses are definitely business-friendly.

Codehaus is pragmatic, we use closed source software if it's better than the opensource alternative

Permitted Licences

Apache Software Licence 2
MIT
BSD
LGPL 2, LGPL 3
GPLv2 + CE (Classpath Exception)
Ruby licence

Prohibited Licences

GPL (there is 1 project using the GPL at Codehaus - Esper - this was due to a miscommunication, and we have made an exception for this project for pragmatic reasons.
Public Domain
Shareware

Licence Violations

[Contact] Codehaus if there is a licence violation (that you can't resolve directly with the project).

Clarifications / Updates

[Contact] Codehaus if you believe a licence is missing or there is something unclear about our policy.