Hi all,
I got an email about the commercial use of ODK so figured I'd answer
it here and open it up for discussion.
ODK uses the permissive Apache 2 license
(http://apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html).
http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#WhatDoesItMEAN has a
human readable explanation of what it means. Comply with that and
you'll be fine. If you want to be kind to the ODK project, include as
much attribution and links to ODK as you can in your derivative work.
The majority of the intellectual property in ODK is held by University
of Washington and by Google. Both of those organizations have lawyers,
and most of those lawyers seem nice and reasonable and not litigious.
That said, if you are using ODK's source or binaries as part of a
system, and especially if you are making or saving greater than $0 by
using ODK, it would be prudent for you to talk to your counsel instead
of relying on this email.
At the end of the day, the project gets better if everyone gives back
more than than they take. Give proper attribution, answer emails on
the list, fix bugs when you see them, contribute translations, write
tutorials for newbies, give talks at conferences, donate to help build
more tools, etc. There are about 1000(!) people on this list and every
little thing each of you do helps.
Thanks,
Yaw