Is it a good idea to use somebody else's library as a base and build your own library over that.I want to make a JavaScript Canvas framework for a animation player on top of KineticJS. Should I do it? Do I need permission from the author of KineticJS? Do I just say to users to donwload KineticJS before my library, or do I just copy paste the kineticJS code in my library?
Is it a good idea to build a library on top of somebody else's library?
javascript;libraries
I see two perspectives to this:Legal: Can you do it?I see no reason you can't. I know there are some laws/rules about bundling other people's libraries, but that would probably only be for proprietary libraries or with licenses that have very specific rules against including them in other projects (This was the case for a company I worked at). I am not aware of any legal reasons why you can't have your end-user go download it themselves; I believe Ubuntu has gotten around this issue just by having end-users download the drivers manually.Design: Should you do it?I once ran into an issue using a library and was getting a very weird error that made no sense to me. It turns out the error was stemming from the fact that the library I was using depended on another library that wasn't referenced properly.So if you use the KineticJS library just make sure that if they don't include the library that you throw an error that tells them that the KineticJS library is missing.