Licensing Vanilla

thejoker101

Just wondering if it's ok to include this forum software in a commercial product. No changes to the forums software itself other than perhaps a few extensions. All copyright information would be left alone. Thanks.

Mark

Vanilla is a GPL'd product, and I always defer to GNU's fantastic documentation on the GPL: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html Basically, if your product isn't going to be GPL'd, then your concern is probably with license compatibility, in which case you should check out this: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation If the GPL doesn't work for you, I'm sure we can make some kind of arrangement.

jcervera

I reopen this old thread, as it's the closes I've found to my question. For me, the integration would be "web" based. Users log in a "commercial" (propietary, or whatever) website, and there's a link for the forum. I would try to modify somehow the vanilla soft to make logged users (in the main site) be automatically logged in the forum, and I could of course share this modification. But I can't open source or GPLize the rest of the site. What's your interpretation on this? I found this: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem "If the two programs remain well separated, like the compiler and the kernel, or like an editor and a shell, then you can treat them as two separate programs—but you have to do it properly. The issue is simply one of form: how you describe what you are doing. Why do we care about this? Because we want to make sure the users clearly understand the free status of the GPL-covered software in the collection." If I state clearly that the forum runs on Vanilla, would this be enough to make this separation? Thanks!