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Flex Cookbook Code License?

The growing Flex Cookbook is great for finding answers for a wide range of problems. The problem is the site doesn't make it clear what license everything is under. For a developer creating a product that uses some of the cookbook code what might it mean? Your guess is as good as mine. For an entry I posted I cited the license the code fell under. While other examples are not as clear. What does that "@author" mean?

I think for the Flex Cookbook to be a general purpose reference it really needs to clearly state the license all code falls under. Ideally it should establish a blanket public domain license. If I'm missing something please let me know.

Tags: cookbook flex license

Posted by Daniel Rinehart on November 8, 2007 7:30 PM |

Comments

I am not certain what license the Flex cookbook code examples fall under, however to answer your question regarding "what @author means" it is a basic Java Doc / ASDoc attribute and is not necessarily recognized by any particular license, at least none that I am aware of.

Posted by: Eric Feminella | November 8, 2007 10:10 PM

My question about @author was to highlight the fact that little things like that make it harder for someone to use the code. While @author isn't clearly stating rights like a copyright or license would, the presence of it complicates matters. If the code is used does that attribution need to remain? I'm sure a lawyer could answer that question but given that Adobe is promoting the site as a developer resource I'd like to see a definitive license applied to all the code.

Posted by: DanielR [TypeKey Profile Page] | November 8, 2007 11:35 PM

Hello everyone--thank you for your comments here! I manage the Flex cookbook at Adobe, and I'm so happy that you asked this question. It's a really good point and I will discuss this with my upper management and make a decision, so we can get some licensing information in there for you all. Added note--we have started using Creative Commons licenses on Flex Developer Center content (all Developer Center content) where authors opt-in to it; but I will investigate what it would take to add it to the Flex cookbook, too.

Posted by: Amy Wong | November 9, 2007 9:49 AM

I am not a lawyer, but it looks like to me like the Adobe site terms of use explicitly have the poster retain the copyright of the post and do not grant site users a license except for personal use. At minimum Adobe should change this to CC licensing.

Posted by: Daniel Freiman | November 9, 2007 10:13 AM