Daniel Arbuckle's Mastering Python

Legalities and licenses of the Python Package Index

Finally, a quick note about legalities and licenses!

The vast majority of packages in the Python Package Index are under open-source licenses as certified by the Open Source Institute (OSI). This means basically that they can be freely used and distributed as part of other open-source projects.

In most cases, the licenses are more liberal than this, allowing us to use the software as part of our projects, even if we don't open source our own code.

Most does not mean all, however some of the packages are not under OSI certified licenses and some of OSI licensed packages are not usable in closed-source projects.

So, if you're going to be distributing your software, take a moment to make sure ...