JavaScript – Combine jQuery, jQueryUI, QTip, and Custom JavaScript into One Minified File

Keep it Simple

Use the MIT/X11 License.

• open and permissible,
• no-brainer / simple,
• allows both free and commercial re-use,
• short,
• clearly gives you copyright,
• well-known and widely used.

I rarely recommend anything else if I don't have a specific reason or am not bound by another license.

Copyright (C)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Or Just Hyper-Link It...

Many JavaScript libraries simply provide:

• a copyright notice,
• and a URL of a publicly hosted verbatim of the license.

This can be an alternative, which allows you to have still a very clear license and keep it short.

IANAL Disclaimer

Though, IANAL and I'm not entirely sure this hyper-link theory really holds, as links are not really perennial resources (though you might argue you could try to prove what they pointed to or contained at a time T).

Laws regulating software, both national or international, are pretty much still in their infancy. This is all rather gray. So you could just go with it, as for now it's a bit obscure what flies and what doesn't.

First, the standard disclaimer: IANAL but a random stranger.

I have been packaging an AGPL application(*) recently. It uses third party libraries distributed under jQuery, MIT, BSD (and some other) licenses. Here is how I have proceeded.

My main intents when I designed this were: be compliant and be fair. While the first one should be sufficient, the second one ensures that whoever tries to sue me for not getting it 100% right has to admit I have done things in good faith.

1) Source files: all my files have the AGPL header. All 3rd party files are left (mostly) unmodified, and therefore include their own license header.

2) LICENSE.txt, at the root of the package, contains the AGPL license text (as explained in the "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs" section).

3) A secondary license file, which I named LICENSE-3RD-PARTY.txt, also located at the root of the package, contains verbatim copies of ALL licenses. For each license, a header states which license it is, and which part it applies to. I also include the name of the copyright holders here - I reuse them somewhere else afterwards so it's worth the effort.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                        The MIT License (MIT)
        applies to: 
        - AJAX Upload, Copyright (c) Andrew Valums
        - jQuery hashchange event, Copyright (c) 2010 "Cowboy" Ben Alman
        - jquery.hotkeys, Copyright (c) 2010 John Resig
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge [...]

4) README.txt, also at the root, explains that the software is AGPL (see LICENSE.txt) and uses third party libraries that are distributed under their own terms (see LICENSE-3RD-PARTY.txt)

5) In the on-line documentation, I have a License page that repeats the information from the readme: my software is AGPL, and it uses 3rd party components that are BSD/MIT/[...]. I have decided to keep this page cleaner and more readable, therefore only the name of the license is provided, with a link to the full text, and the name of the copyright holders with a link to their own website.

jQuery
    Copyright 2013 jQuery Foundation and other contributors
    http://jquery.com
    MIT License
Data Driven Documents (D3)
    Copyright (c) 2013, Michael Bostock    <-- link to personal website, if any
    http://d3js.org                        <-- link to software website
    BSD-like license                       <-- link to license full text
[...]

6) Also in the on-line documentation, I have a Credits page, where I list the direct and indirect main contributors. I have for instance cited the PostgreSQL group, although PostgreSQL is not included in the download, but you need it to run the software. This would be a good place to place all acknowledgements that are either required or desired by the authors of 3rd party tools/libraries/etc.

7) Inside the software itself, the list of libraries along with the license and copyright holders, is repeated in the About dialog box.

To address your specific questions regarding inclusion of source code and file layout:

• it is generally accepted to only link to the full source code of 3rd party packages. Consult each specific license to be sure, but IMHO providing the link should be enough. For instance, if you use a minified version of a library, you can provide the link to the standard download and be fine.

• unless the 3rd party component explicitly demands that distributions keep the file layout identical, you can re-arrange things as you wish. Imagine you use web libraries, having each a css/ and a js/ directory, you can merge them together into a single lib/ directory, containing merged css/ and js/, or even scatter them all around your source tree - your choice.

And as a final note, I would more than welcome commenters who wave a hand saying "you are doing this wrong" and/or "you should also do that".

_{(*) This is not intended to be spam linking, but just to answer the "please provide examples" part of the question. Feel free, dear mods, to clear this link if this is against the rules.}