By bali on
I understand Drupal is licensed under GNU/GPL. I wonder if it is allowed to use Drupal as part of a commercial service. E.g. can we host a Drupal-based site as part of a service we offer our customers?
I understand Drupal is licensed under GNU/GPL. I wonder if it is allowed to use Drupal as part of a commercial service. E.g. can we host a Drupal-based site as part of a service we offer our customers?
Comments
There is an extensive discuss
There is an extensive discussion about this already in the User Experience (?) forum: license
extensive discussion
Well, some of Al's comments on that page might lead you to believe that you can't sell the code, which is not true. If you redistribute GNU GPL licensed code, with or without changes made by you, you must include/release under the GNU GPL license and make the source code available to whomever gets a copy, whether you give it away or sell it.
In fact, Stallman encourages selling free software. And for more explanation about the GNU GPL which may make this clearer, as well as the history of the GNU and free software, see Stallman's The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement.
Confused
I'd read the Stallman article cel4145 mentions. It lead me to the conclusion I could use Drupal the way I planned. But then I saw the eZ Publish site, which makes a whole point out of their dual license scheme, which features a 'professional license' that "allows you a full protection of your work made with eZ publish. With the professional licence you may rebrand, licence and close your source code."
So at the extreme ends of the spectrum I can see the difference between 'distribute for a fee' and the rebrand etc. situation. But there is a whole lot of possibilities in between, that are at least prone to discussion about whether or not they are allowed under GNU GPL. And then, who gets to decided about these situations?
a judge decides
if someone thinks you are violating their license, they will send you a nasty letter. if don't stop your alleged violating, you could wind up in court, where a judge decides who is correct.
Before court
OK, that's 'after the fact'. But are there possibilities to discuss usage of say Drupal on beforehand?
Since Drupal is released under the GPL
you should read more about the GPL at www.GNU.org.
The main issue is:
If you make changes to GPLed software /and/ /if/ you distribute (for free or for a charge) your changes, you have to distribute them unter the GPL as well.
/Using/ software which is released unter the GPL is not so much the issue.
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there are no GPL court precedents
FYI, there has never been a single court opinion involving the GPL. If you go to court, you will be the first. This is according to a lawyer who works with the FSF.
who decides
Columbia Law Professor Eben Moglen has pointed out that the GNU GPL is pretty easy to enforce legally.
Re: Using Drupal in a commercial service
As I understand the question, you are asking if you have a commercial service and install Drupal as part of it, can you still charge for the service, or are you violating the GPL?
My interpretation of the GPL (I'm not a lawyer) would indicate that you are not violating the GPL, as you are not bundling Drupal into a commercial offering and selling Drupal, but rather the access to a database that happens to use Drupal as the front end.
An example of this would be a system like osCommerce, which is GPL'd and is used as the engine for web stores. You can even add CMS apps such as post nuke, etc to it and still make money by selling items on the site, and using the CMS as the tech support forum.
GPL Meaning
Basically, a GPL software is one where the author keeps rights but allow you to do what you want to it as long as you don't charge for the software itself and that as part of any distribution you made of the software you allow anyone to obtain the modifications you've made to the software.
So yes you can sell your service or installation fee for Drupal (even if the Author or somebody you know says no because the license allow you to do it.) You can't sell the software itself for any other cost than the cost it actually cost you to distribute. Meaning if you burn over a CD it is the cost of the CD + your time burning it and some cost related to the fact that you bougth the CD burner. If you send it over the net you may charge for the bandwidth usage and the server you're running considering you maintain it etc...
You have to give the SAME GPL license to everyone to who you distribute the software to (meaning people who pay you for the distribution has to get the GPL license, so they'll realise you charge them illegally for the software :-) ) and allow anyone to obtain a copy of the software through snail mail as long as they pay the stamps and all that, this means you need to provide a snail mail address with the distribution or a way to contact you so that one can obtain the address afterwards.
You can sell the software ONLY, if you communicate with all the authors (copy rights holders) and get them to approve that they release to you a distribution of the same software on a separate license which allow you to obtain fee for the software other than for distribution. Note that if you can't obtain the license from everyone you'll be required to remove code that are belonging to the author to which you have not received the ok, if you can't identify all the authors it doesn't give you rights to get the code of those unidentified part under a new license.
I'm no lawers, but this is what I understand of the GPL. I hope it helps.
re: GPL meaning
"as long as you don't charge for the software itself."
That's an assumption that many people make, but it's incorrect. In fact, you could take the Drupal 4.2rc tarball (or any other GNU GPL licensed software), burn it to cd, put it in nice packaging, and sell it over the Internet for $1000 a cd (of course, no one would buy it when they could download it for free here), as long as you include the licensing information in the manner stated in the license and make the source code available.
"You can't sell the software itself for any other cost than the cost it actually cost you to distribute. Meaning if you burn over a CD it is the cost of the CD + your time burning it and some cost related to the fact that you bougth the CD burner. If you send it over the net you may charge for the bandwidth usage and the server you're running considering you maintain it etc..."
This condition only goes into effect when you fail to provide the source code with the program when you originally distribute it. This is all covered in section 3 of the GNU GPL license. So, for example, if you distribute a binary version of GNU GPL'd software, without the source code, you are obligated to:
"Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange" (Section 3b of the GNU GPL, from OSI; GNU.org seems to be down at the moment).
What this prevents is someone giving away or selling a binary of GNU GPL'd code, then charging an enormous fee for the source code separately. The idea being that anyone who receives a copy of a GNU GPL'd application is automatically entitiled to the source code as well.
this guy is right
I went to law school and my husband is a lawyer - we both concur with the above interpretation of the GNU license. Commercial use is allowed as long as both the source code and the license are included with the re-distribution.
Which Source Code?
Just the original source code of the open source application, or the source code of the open source application and modifications/additions?
My guess is that only the source code of the open source application would be necessary. In part or whole, modifications/additions would remain copyrighted by the commercial author (if he/she chooses).
Why don't people actually read the GPL?
It must be one of the more wide spread documents on the net.
If you want to distribute changes that you made to GPLed software you have to distribute those changes under the GPL again. Of course you can keep your code and not distribute it at all.
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My Drupal services
Additional Code
I think someone could easily make the argument that additional code was separate from the GPLed software, and not covered by the GPL.
We frequently see this with software (where each piece has a separate license). Adobe plugins, for example, Adobe's license does not automatically cover a separate company's plugin for Adobe. There are many other example with Office products. Or with Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux --- there is software that works with open source software and is in addition to open source software, but is commercial and the code is not shared.
I could see someone using Drupal, releasing the source for Drupal and having a module that is separate, commercial and under a different license not requiring distribution of the code.
The topic of plug-ins
The topic of plug-ins is very, very difficult. If you totally separated a module from Drupal -- i.e. didn't use any of the APIs, didn't use of the calls, etc. etc. -- you MIGHT get away with not distributing source for it.
Don't think of distributing source as such a bad thing! There are very few people that will be able to make use of source. There is huge money to be made in offering good service, installation, support, and, most importantly, customization!
The more than people contribute code directly to Drupal -- as core (not likely) or as a module (great!), the more people will use Drupal and the more demand there will be for Drupal-related services.
(PS This comment is not translating line breaks into br's; I've added br's to compensate)
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Boris Mann
Commercial Use
I reckon it is fair enough for people to charge for module development. I developed 2 modules for Drupal so far, both open source. The donations have not nearly covered the development costs (time, hosting of the website etc). They charge large sums for Drupal themes at http://www.topnotchthemes.com . So, I think it's fair enough to charge accordingly for Drupal module development. Since it's all PHP you don't really have a choice of distributing it closed source unless you use a PHP encoder which by itself doesn't really work. I have been able to decode the code no matter what I used, it just gets hard when the code is 'unmaintained' with such a tool...
Anyway, that's not the issue. My question is: "Does everything based on the GPL have to be GPLed as well? even if it's just using software based on the GPL? I don't think so. Linux servers are used for commercial software projects and in a way everything running on them would then be based on the GPL, even a C program written by company XYZ since it runs on the linux kernel... I think it's a bit of give and take and the boundaries should be flexible enough for software companies to make money off open source software, otherwise open source software is useless to them and would die. I'm willing to make as much as i can open source, but ...
http://www.ihostnz.com
Went to law school?
You were just shopping for a groom! :)