The Shtoom License ------------------ Shtoom is licensed under the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License (LGPL). This document attempts to lay out what this means. The goal of Shtoom's license is to make sure that all changes and improvements to the shtoom code are released back to the community. Any additional code that merely uses the shtoom code is free to remain closed, open, or whatever the author of the code wants to do. Essentially, what this means is that if you make changes or additions to any of the source files that are distributed as part of shtoom, you *must* make those modified source files available. If you write new modules, you're free to do with them what you will (obviously, if they're the sort of thing that's going to be useful to a lot of people, I'd encourage you to consider contributing them, but that's your call). The rationale for this licensing is that SIP is a complex beast, and there's many, many implementations of it. I only have access to a fraction of these, which makes it hard to do interoperability testing. I am open to adopting another license and making the shtoom code dual licensed, so long as it fulfills the goal I've listed above. An MIT or BSD style license is not acceptable, as it doesn't do what I want. The Creative Commons licenses are more aimed at non-code, and none of these seem to achieve what I want (with the obvious exception of the CC LGPL, which is the same as the LGPL). Of course, if your changes are purely local and you never intend to distribute them to someone else, you can do whatever you like. The shtoom license only applies if you redistribute the licensed material.