Licensing for 3rd party applications & plugins

manila

How would the 3rd party applications & plugins be licensed?

Would all of those be required to be licensed as GPL v2?

Mark

A few months ago I spoke with some lawyers that specialize in open source to clarify this.

If I remember correctly, it goes like this: If you alter the Garden, Vanilla, or any other GPL'd code, your alterations must fall under the GPL. But, if you write an application or plugin that doesn't actually alter the garden code in any way, then you can license that application under any license you wish.

I can get back in touch with my people to find out for sure, or you can read about the GPL yourself at: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

manila

The gray area from what I have read so far is the presumption about derivative work.

If an application developed on Garden framework is considered as derivative work then... even if the application has no code from other opensource applications, the application would need to be opensourced.

I would love to hear your stand.

Mark

Derivative, to me, means that you take my work and alter it.

New applications, plugins, and themes in Garden don't actually alter the core code in any way. To me that means that they are not derivative.

I am meeting with a lawyer today for lunch who specializes in open source - I'll bring it up with him to be sure.

manila

Hi Mark, how did the meeting go?

Linc

I don't know how similar Vanilla's themes and plugins are to Wordpress, but this is what the Software Freedom Law Center had to say about licensing of their themes & plugins: http://wordpress.org/development/2009/07/themes-are-gpl-too/

manila

yeah Lincoln. thanks for pointing out.

however, if Garden's purpose were to be a pluggable platform... then current licensing is restrictive. because anything that's built on Garden should then be GPL v2 compatible...

i would love to hear the clear stand as i am still evaluating platforms to build upon my community.

andy33

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Mark

Anyone else think Andy33 is a spambot? (no offense if you're not, Andy!)

I spoke with my lawyer friend, and he said that my assumptions were correct. Any code that you write can be licensed any way you want - so long as it doesn't alter the code of Garden. So, plugins and applications and themes can be licensed however you want. But if they touch the code of Garden, you have to release those changes back to us.

He also said that even if there are differing opinions out there about how this works, the bottom line is that we own Garden, we decide the licensing, and we decide how we want to enforce it. I feel that you should be able to write applications, plugins, and themes for Garden/Vanilla and not have to give them back to us.

My goal all along has been that people should be able to take this framework and run with it without owing anything back to us unless they alter the framework itself (which should benefit the community as a whole).

Linc

Thanks for the clarification @Mark.

Also... yup, definitely a spambot.

manila

Thanks for clarifying Mark...

an intelligent spam...

manila

I intend to create a light-weight cms like RadiantCMS ... gonna be opensource...

Mark

Awesome!