For the project, code contributed and written by NYPL and partner libraries is under Apache License, Ver 2.0
- SimplyE Server, Web and Mobile Application Licenses
- 3rd Party Commercial Licenses (Mobile) - 3rd Party Components are under BSD or commercial license.
- Adobe RMSDK Connector - Commercial (Contact WebQEM)
- Adobe Vendor ID - Commercial (Contact WebQEM)
- PSPDFKit -
- Findaway SDK -
3rd Party Components are under BSD or commercial license.
- Readium SDK - BSD
SimplyE Server, Web and Mobile Application Licenses
Circulation Manager
Copyright © 2015 The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.
Licensing of Contributions
Any third-party libraries (e.g. Node / Python / Swift / Java / Maven Dependencies) required to compile or run SimplyE must be included. The license of any required jar/dependency MUST be compatible with BSD. It must not prevent any commercial use of SimplyE, nor have any impact on the rest of the code by its inclusion. It is not acceptable to require additional downloads of dependencies to make SimplyE compile or function.
Examples of acceptable licenses:
- Apache License 2.0
- BSD
- Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL)
- Common Public License (CPL)
- GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL)
- MIT / X11 License
- Mozilla Public License
- Additional examples may be found in our LICENSES_THIRD_PARTY file in the source code. This file lists the licenses of all third-party libraries used by NYPL.
Examples of unacceptable licenses:
- GNU General Public License (GPL)
- GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL)
- European Union Public Licence (EUPL)
- Similar to GPL, this license is "share alike" / "strong copyleft" and may require usage of the same license for redistribution or derivatives. For more information, see the EUPL FAQ (specifically the questions "What about compatibility issues?" and "Are there limitations to the use of the software?")
- Any license which requires "same license" (i.e. strong copyleft) as detailed at http://choosealicense.com/licenses/
- Any license which limits commercial use/redistribution of binary code
Why is GPL (and similar) unacceptable?
- Can I release a modified version of a GPL-covered program in binary form only?
- If I distribute GPL'd software for a fee, am I required to also make it available to the public without a charge?
In addition, the Apache Software Foundation has a good explanation of why they are also forced to avoid GPL-based (copyleft) licenses because of its one-way compatibility with Apache License 2.0:
"This licensing incompatibility applies only when some Apache project software becomes a derivative work of some GPLv3 software, because then the Apache software would have to be distributed under GPLv3.
We avoid GPLv3 software because merely linking to it is considered by the GPLv3 authors to create a derivative work. We want to honor their license. Unless GPLv3 licensors relax this interpretation of their own license regarding linking, our licensing philosophies are fundamentally incompatible. This is an identical issue for both GPLv2 and GPLv3."
While SimplyE is released under Apache licensing, the same issues exist between BSD licenses and GPL-based licenses.
Database Schema Changes
Database schema changes will be done only on major revisions to the source; this is when the version number takes the form x.0 (e.g. 2.0). When making patches which cause schema changes, it is necessary to update all of the relevant SQL/migration files with your sequences, tables, views etc.