About Screen: licensing terms for Ionic Apps

When building an Ionic App, there are usually lots of different technologies that are used. For example:




While most all of them are Open Source in one form or another, there still are licensing requirements. Notably with regards to attribution when distributing the code. I took a look today at a few of the showcased Ionic apps in the Google Appstore, none of the ones I checked had an about screen that listed any license or attribution.

My understanding from reading the MIT License FAQ (http://www.tophatstuff.co.uk/archive.php?p=40) is that the License must be included with the distribution of the app. There is a section that talks about rendering HTML ā€˜server-sideā€™ and if a license notice is required or not. In that case, there is no redistribution, so displaying the license is not required. However, in the case of an Ionic app, we are distributing the whole framework. Including Ionic, Angular, etc.

Based on that understanding, shouldnā€™t Ionic apps be required to include/display the MIT License information for each bit of software used? For an example of a HUGE licensing file, take a look at the aboutā€“>license section of the Facebook app!

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IANAL, but technically, the license is already included as it is in the source code of you app. Is putting an app on the App Store the same ā€œdistributionā€ concept in the MIT license? Thatā€™s hard to say. At any rate, any major app will want to vet OSS licenses for any software and comply. In this case, we donā€™t expect you to put any kind of license text in the app itself :slight_smile:

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But youā€™d surely appreciate it :wink: