By santosh.rj on

Hi,

I am building a site based on Drupal 5.7 and some contributed modules. This site would be provided to various clients who would be charged a registration fees and an annual renewal fees.

We will be running drupal core and contributed modules unchanged or with certain hacks.

What I want to know is given that most of these are licensed under GPL
1) Is it legally correct for me to charge for the services on my site even though it is based primarily on Drupal?
2) Do I have to share the changed source code or any source code at all with my clients?

Thanks and Warm Regards
Santosh

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

thx538’s picture

thx538 commented

1) Yes
2) Yes

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

1) Yes, you can charge.

2) If you're hosting the sites on your own, no. If you are giving them the website then you can't do that without giving them the source. PHP is a scripting language.

I'm not a lawyer but my understanding of GPL is it's about distribution. If you make a module and keep it on just your site and don't distribute it, that's legal. There's a lot of benefits to sharing your code, though, so what's legal isn't always what's best.

Michelle

--------------------------------------
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

santosh.rj’s picture

santosh.rj commented

Thanks for your replies folks.

thx538 - Thanks you for your reply. I did read the GPL but found that it adressess distribution of software and not pointers on a hosted website where you want to charge for service. Would be rateful if you can point me to relevant sections/links.

Michelle Thanks for your clarification... Yes I would be hosting it and not giving the website to my clients. We want to share code and would definitely look at sharing our new modules with the entire community. However some of the hacks we are making are in core drupal and many a times they might not make much sense to anyone as it is for our specific purpose..For eg we have revamped node access cause we did not see many modules having different that implement access hook working well together.

Is there anyway I can get "Official" word from the people at Drupal or this discussion board should work?
Regards
Santosh

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

"I did read the GPL but found that it adressess distribution of software and not pointers on a hosted website where you want to charge for service"

That's the point. GPL only comes into play when you distribute your code. If you make changes and keep them to yourself, that's totally legal.

"Is there anyway I can get "Official" word from the people at Drupal"

The people at Drupal are all of us. It's an open source project run by the community. If you want something official, I suggest consulting a lawyer schooled in software licensing.

Michelle

--------------------------------------
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

floydwilde’s picture

floydwilde commented

The GPL does sorta focus on the distribution, and it was originally written back when people used sneakernet a little more. The AfferoGPL sorta tries to compesate for this phenomenea of people creating applications that live on the net:

http://www.affero.org/oagpl.html

I still think it's a fad though, it'll burn out.

santosh.rj’s picture

santosh.rj commented

Thanks Michelle, Just wanted this clarified to be sure we are doing things the right way.

Looking forward to building a great site and even contributing back to the Drupal community

Regards