Is this legal? (GPL Software / Licensing Issues)
I work for a software / design firm and I recently found out that our "in house" CMS is actually MODx that has been re-skinned by one of our designers. MODx is licensed under the GPL Ver 2.. I would like to know if it is ethical / legal to be selling this to clients.
We also offer another package that is actually ZenCart, is this legal as well?
I thought that software for commercial applications needed to be LGPL, are these applications being used "commercially"? We are certainly selling them to clients, while acting like they were developed in house...
I'd love to hear your thought / clarifications on this topic, I for one find it at least unethical. What do you think?
Don't act on any legal advice you read on a forum like StackOverflow -- including mine. :-)
Here's a passage about GPL from Wikipedia (emphasis mine):
The terms and conditions of the GPL are available to anybody receiving a copy of the work that has a GPL applied to it ("the licensee"). Any licensee who adheres to the terms and conditions is given permission to modify the work, as well as to copy and redistribute the work or any derivative version. The licensee is allowed to charge a fee for this service, or do this free of charge. This latter point distinguishes the GPL from software licenses that prohibit commercial redistribution. The FSF argues that free software should not place restrictions on commercial use, and the GPL explicitly states that GPL works may be sold at any price.
However, if your company is distributing the software under another license not compatible with GPL, then they're violating their license.
ZenCart is also licensed under GPL, so the same restrictions apply.
For in-house use, you'd be fine.
For selling to clients, you'd have to give the source code to them if they ask for it, and make sure that they know that they are entitled to the source code.
As Harper Shelby suggests, you should talk to your management chain first, then your company's lawyers. If they don't sort things out on their own, then you should consider contacting the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), and maybe the authors of the packages too.
There was a recent post on Groklaw entitled "FSFE and GPL-Violations.org Release Guide to Handling License Violations". FSFE is the Free Software Foundation Europe, and GPL-Violations.org has the goal:
The gpl-violations.org project tries to raise public awareness about past and present infringing use(r)s of GPL licensed software.
The ultimate goal is to make vendors of GPL licensed software understand that GPL is not public domain, and that there are license conditions that are to be fulfilled.
For another illustration of GPL issues, see "Stallman Calls Out Cisco - GPL Violations Alleged" at Dr Dobbs CodeTalk. More on Cisco's problems with GPL.
It's perfectly legal to sell a modified version of GPL (at least v2, I'm not as familiar with v3) software. However, you must still comply with the terms of the license - you must offer the source code, including your modifications, if the modifications fall under the definition of a 'derivative work', which it seems likely they do from your brief description.
Jonathan Leffler's links and recommendations are good, though I'd recommend mentioning the issues to your internal people first - at least give them the chance to do the right thing before you release the hounds.
链接地址: http://www.djcxy.com/p/79726.html下一篇: 这合法吗？ （GPL软件/许可问题）