Liberal Licensing — Yahoo Gets it Right

Via the O’Reilly Radar I saw that Yahoo (excuse me, “Yahoo!”) has released two new assets for developers: a UI library and a design pattern library. So the UI library isn’t that interesting to me — I haven’t done enough [STRIKEOUT:DHTML]AJAX programming to really figure out what to look for in a toolkit. And the Design Patterns are probably only interesting if you’re doing dynamic web stuff.

But there are couple of things that really impress me. First, the design patterns all provide information on how accessibility issues should be handled. Sure, its prescriptive rather than descriptive, but even formalizing what should happen is a good thing — a sign of a maturing technology is stabilized idioms, right?

Second, both are liberally licensed; the UI library under a BSD License and the design patterns under the most liberal CC license — Attribution 2.5 . My opinions on software licensing are evolving, but lately I really appreciate it when authors give me more rights to reuse their work in a manner I wish. Bravo, Yahoo!.