Most software is distributed under a license, which means there are certain things that you are legally permitted (and not permitted) to do with the software and source code.
Baseform's software includes both proprietary and open-source components, and we do not think that all the tools that can exist around our platform will have to be bound to the same license. There are already different licenses on libraries used by Baseform tools — on every tool and app, we state its exact license and the licenses of any libraries used.
About the GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License, or GPL, is an open-source license. Open-source doesn't just mean that you can view the source code — it has a broader philosophical implication. 'Free' is not a statement related to price; rather, it refers to certain freedoms, namely: freedom to run the software, freedom to study how it works, freedom to try changing it and freedom to share within certain limits, namely keeping any derived works under the same type of licensing. This means that you cannot profit directly from the work or from maintaining the attribution and integrity of the existing license. The difference between the two is often compared to the distinction between 'free as in speech' vs. 'free as in beer' — GPL is free as in speech. To find out more:
- GNU definition of free software
- Who's using free software (from the Free Software Foundation)
- Open Source Initiative
- Open Source Initiative GPL 3.0 page
- The text version of the GPL 3.0 license.
Baseform's open source code is made available on GitHub: go to github.com/Baseform/.
Detailed third-party open-source licensing
Apache Software Foundation projects
Cayenne, Commons, HttpComponents, Lucene, Batik, XML Graphics Commons, Log4j, POI, XMLBeans, DataSketches, Fory
License: Apache License, Version 2.0
Other Apache-licensed libraries
Jackson, Jettison, Gson, Guava, Protostuff, Brotli4j, HikariCP, Ehcache, Jackcess, EJML, EvalEx, Parboiled, SQLite JDBC, Jasper
License: Apache License, Version 2.0
Eclipse Foundation projects
Jakarta Servlet/JSP/JSTL APIs, Eclipse EMF, JTS Topology Suite
License: EPL 2.0 (Jakarta APIs also GPL 2.0 with Classpath Exception)
GeoTools and related geospatial libraries
GeoTools, Indriya / Unit-API
License: GeoTools: LGPL 2.1; Indriya / Unit-API: BSD 3-Clause
Databases and drivers
H2 MVStore, HSQLDB, DuckDB, PostgreSQL JDBC
License: H2: MPL 2.0 or EPL 1.0 (H2 license); HSQLDB: BSD; DuckDB: MIT; PostgreSQL JDBC: BSD 2-Clause
Logging
Logback, SLF4J
License: Logback: EPL 1.0 or LGPL 2.1 (Logback license); SLF4J: MIT
BSD / MIT licensed libraries
XStream, Janino, OWASP Java Encoder, RE2/J, ASM, Protocol Buffers (BSD); jsoup, GeographicLib-Java (MIT)
License: BSD 3-Clause / MIT (e.g. XStream, ASM)
GraalVM JavaScript (Truffle)
License: Universal Permissive License 1.0
Other
Trove4j, Jakarta Mail / Activation, JDOM, XPP3 / XmlPull
License: Trove4j: LGPL 2.1; Jakarta Mail / Activation: CDDL 1.1 / GPL 2.0 with Classpath Exception; JDOM: Apache-style license; XPP3 / XmlPull: Indiana University Extreme! Lab Software License
Mapping
OpenLayers (including legacy OpenLayers 2), ol-ext, MapLibre GL JS, deck.gl, PROJ4JS
License: OpenLayers: BSD 2-Clause; ol-ext: CeCILL-B; MapLibre: BSD 3-Clause; deck.gl: MIT; PROJ4JS: MIT
UI utilities
jQuery, SortableJS, Dropzone, esbuild (build tool)
License: MIT (jQuery license)
jQuery Tablesorter
License: MIT or GPL 2.0
Addition CayWeb, Reports and User Interface (AddUI2)
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License