# MIT license as default for CSL software

**URL:** <https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/mit-license-as-default-for-csl-software/1243>\
**Category:** CSL Development\
**Created:** [January 10, 2015, 3:10am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/mit-license-as-default-for-csl-software/1243 "2015-01-10T03:10:29Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Rintze\_Zelle](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/rintze_zelle/32/175_2.png) [@Rintze\_Zelle](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Rintze_Zelle)\
**Post date:** [January 10, 2015, 3:10am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/mit-license-as-default-for-csl-software/1243/1 "2015-01-10T03:10:29Z")

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Hi all,

While all our styles and locale files, and most of our documentation  
is released under CC BY-SA, we never selected a license for our CSL  
software. While our software mostly consists of scripts that are used  
within the project, I still think it’s a good idea to choose a  
permissive license.

Dan Stillman just agreed to license  
[https://github.com/citation-style-language/distribution-updater/](https://github.com/citation-style-language/distribution-updater/) under  
the MIT license. Carles Pina, Charles Parnot, Sebastian Karcher and I  
agreed to license code we contributed to the CSL project (i.e., code  
contributed at [https://github.com/citation-style-language](https://github.com/citation-style-language)) under the  
MIT license as well.

Unless anybody requests otherwise, I think that this suffices to add  
the MIT license to the “utilities”, “distribution-updater”, and  
“csl-validator” repos. And I think it makes sense to use this license  
as the default for new code.

Thanks to Philipp Zumstein for starting this discussion:

> <https://github.com/citation-style-language/csl-validator/issues/5>
>
> Can you say something about the licence for this code?

Rintze

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**Author:** ![Charles\_Parnot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/57b2e6/32.png) [@Charles\_Parnot](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Charles_Parnot)\
**Post date:** [January 10, 2015, 6:12am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/mit-license-as-default-for-csl-software/1243/2 "2015-01-10T06:12:41Z")

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Excellent!

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**Author:** ![Rintze\_Zelle](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/rintze_zelle/32/175_2.png) [@Rintze\_Zelle](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Rintze_Zelle)\
**Post date:** [June 14, 2015, 3:16pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/mit-license-as-default-for-csl-software/1243/3 "2015-06-14T15:16:04Z")

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As a follow-up on this, we just got a request to clarify the license  
for the CSL schema. It currently says “Permission to freely use, copy  
and distribute.”, which doesn’t discuss modification. This raised some  
red flags with the Debian packagers:  
[https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=775532](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=775532)

Bruce agreed with my suggestion to relicense the schema under the MIT  
license. So unless anybody objects to this or wishes to suggest a  
different license, we’ll go with that.

Rintze

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**Author:** ![Simon\_Kornblith](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce7236/32.png) [@Simon\_Kornblith](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Simon_Kornblith)\
**Post date:** [June 14, 2015, 5:38pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/mit-license-as-default-for-csl-software/1243/4 "2015-06-14T17:38:09Z")

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I agree to license my contributions to the schema under the MIT license.

Simon