When we do this, it is a matter of strategy. This happens when the program's developers and the GNU Project agree to do it. You should report it. First, check the facts as best you can.
Then tell the publisher or copyright holder of the specific GPL-covered program. Otherwise, the program's maintainer may be the copyright holder, or else could tell you how to contact the copyright holder, so report it to the maintainer. A crucial aspect of free software is that users are free to cooperate. It is absolutely essential to permit users who wish to help each other to share their bug fixes and improvements with other users.
Some have proposed alternatives to the GPL that require modified versions to go through the original author. As long as the original author keeps up with the need for maintenance, this may work well in practice, but if the author stops more or less to do something else or does not attend to all the users' needs, this scheme falls down. Aside from the practical problems, this scheme does not allow users to help each other. Sometimes control over modified versions is proposed as a means of preventing confusion between various versions made by users.
In our experience, this confusion is not a major problem. The GPL requires the maker of a version to place his or her name on it, to distinguish it from other versions and to protect the reputations of other maintainers. The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations including companies , too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.
But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the program's users, under the GPL. Thus, the GPL gives permission to release the modified program in certain ways, and not in other ways; but the decision of whether to release it is up to you.
The GPL gives a person permission to make and redistribute copies of the program if and when that person chooses to do so. That person also has the right not to choose to redistribute the program. If you choose to provide source through a written offer, then anybody who requests the source from you is entitled to receive it. If you commercially distribute binaries not accompanied with source code, the GPL says you must provide a written offer to distribute the source code later.
When users non-commercially redistribute the binaries they received from you, they must pass along a copy of this written offer. This means that people who did not get the binaries directly from you can still receive copies of the source code, along with the written offer.
The reason we require the offer to be valid for any third party is so that people who receive the binaries indirectly in that way can order the source code from you. Section 2 says that modified versions you distribute must be licensed to all third parties under the GPL. It only means they have a license from you, under the GPL, for your version.
You are not required to claim a copyright on your changes. In most countries, however, that happens automatically by default, so you need to place your changes explicitly in the public domain if you do not want them to be copyrighted.
Whether you claim a copyright on your changes or not, either way you must release the modified version, as a whole, under the GPL if you release your modified version at all. Under copyright law, translation of a work is considered a kind of modification.
Therefore, what the GPL says about modified versions applies also to translated versions. The translation is covered by the copyright on the original program. If the original program carries a free license, that license gives permission to translate it. How you can use and license the translated program is determined by that license.
You can do that, if you can figure out which part is the public domain part and separate it from the rest. If code was put in the public domain by its developer, it is in the public domain no matter where it has been. Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge.
The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release. You can charge any fee you wish for distributing a copy of the program. If the binaries being distributed are licensed under the GPLv3, then you must offer equivalent access to the source code in the same way through the same place at no further charge.
In fact, a requirement like that would make the program nonfree. If people have to pay when they get a copy of a program, or if they have to notify anyone in particular, then the program is not free. See the definition of free software. The GPL is a free software license, and therefore it permits people to use and even redistribute the software without being required to pay anyone a fee for doing so. You can charge people a fee to get a copy from you. You can't require people to pay you when they get a copy from someone else.
However, if someone pays your fee and gets a copy, the GPL gives them the freedom to release it to the public, with or without a fee. For example, someone could pay your fee, and then put her copy on a web site for the general public. The GPL says that anyone who receives a copy from you has the right to redistribute copies, modified or not. You are not allowed to distribute the work on any more restrictive basis. If the violation involves GPL-covered code that has some other copyright holder, please inform that copyright holder, just as you would for any other kind of violation of the GPL.
Thus, anyone who receives a copy of your version from you has the right to redistribute copies modified or not of that version. You may not distribute any version of the work on a more restrictive basis. For instance, you can accept a contract to develop changes and agree not to release your changes until the client says ok. You can also release your changes to the client under the GPL, but agree not to release them to anyone else unless the client says ok. The GPL would give the client the right to redistribute your version.
In this scenario, the client will probably choose not to exercise that right, but does have the right.
You can certainly get credit for the work. Part of releasing a program under the GPL is writing a copyright notice in your own name assuming you are the copyright holder. The GPL requires all copies to carry an appropriate copyright notice. No, this is not permitted under the terms of the GPL.
While we recognize that proper citation is an important part of academic publications, citation cannot be added as an additional requirement to the GPL. Requiring citation in research papers which made use of GPLed software goes beyond what would be an acceptable additional requirement under section 7 b of GPLv3, and therefore would be considered an additional restriction under Section 7 of the GPL.
And copyright law does not allow you to place such a requirement on the output of software , regardless of whether it is licensed under the terms of the GPL or some other license.
Including a copy of the license with the work is vital so that everyone who gets a copy of the program can know what their rights are. It might be tempting to include a URL that refers to the license, instead of the license itself. But you cannot be sure that the URL will still be valid, five years or ten years from now. Twenty years from now, URLs as we know them today may no longer exist.
The only way to make sure that people who have copies of the program will continue to be able to see the license, despite all the changes that will happen in the network, is to include a copy of the license in the program. Without such a statement, it's not entirely clear that the permissions in the license really apply to any particular source file. An explicit statement saying that eliminates all doubt. A file containing just a license, without a statement that certain other files are covered by that license, resembles a file containing just a subroutine which is never called from anywhere else.
The resemblance is not perfect: lawyers and courts might apply common sense and conclude that you must have put the copy of the GNU GPL there because you wanted to license the code that way. Or they might not. Why leave an uncertainty?
This statement should be in each source file. A clear statement in the program's README file is legally sufficient as long as that accompanies the code , but it is easy for them to get separated.
Why take a risk of uncertainty about your code's license? You should put a notice at the start of each source file, stating what license it carries, in order to avoid risk of the code's getting disconnected from its license. That other context may not show what the file's license is. It may appear to have some other license, or no license at all which would make the code nonfree. Adding a copyright notice and a license notice at the start of each source file is easy and makes such confusion unlikely.
If a whole software package contains very little code—less than lines is the benchmark we use—you may as well use a lax permissive license for it, rather than a copyleft license like the GNU GPL. Unless, that is, the code is specially important. We recommend the Apache License 2. They will not make a substantial fractional change in the size of a software package unless the package itself is quite small. In order to combine two programs or substantial parts of them into a larger work, you need to have permission to use both programs in this way.
If the two programs' licenses permit this, they are compatible. If there is no way to satisfy both licenses at once, they are incompatible. For some licenses, the way in which the combination is made may affect whether they are compatible—for instance, they may allow linking two modules together, but not allow merging their code into one module.
If you just want to install two separate programs in the same system, it is not necessary that their licenses be compatible, because this does not combine them into a larger work. The other license is compatible with the GPL if it permits this too. GPLv3 is compatible with more licenses than GPLv2: it allows you to make combinations with code that has specific kinds of additional requirements that are not in GPLv3 itself.
Section 7 has more information about this, including the list of additional requirements that are permitted. If you do this, your program won't be fully usable in a free environment. If your program depends on a nonfree library to do a certain job, it cannot do that job in the Free World. If it depends on a nonfree library to run at all, it cannot be part of a free operating system such as GNU; it is entirely off limits to the Free World.
So please consider: can you find a way to get the job done without using this library? Can you write a free replacement for that library? If the program is already written using the nonfree library, perhaps it is too late to change the decision. You may as well release the program as it stands, rather than not release it.
But please mention in the README that the need for the nonfree library is a drawback, and suggest the task of changing the program so that it does the same job without the nonfree library. Please suggest that anyone who thinks of doing substantial further work on the program first free it from dependence on the nonfree library. Note that there may also be legal issues with combining certain nonfree libraries with GPL-covered free software.
Both versions of the GPL have an exception to their copyleft, commonly called the system library exception. If the GPL-incompatible libraries you want to use meet the criteria for a system library, then you don't have to do anything special to use them; the requirement to distribute source code for the whole program does not include those libraries, even if you distribute a linked executable containing them. If you want your program to link against a library not covered by the system library exception, you need to provide permission to do that.
In either case, you should put this text in each file to which you are granting this permission. Only the copyright holders for the program can legally release their software under these terms. If you wrote the whole program yourself, then assuming your employer or school does not claim the copyright, you are the copyright holder—so you can authorize the exception.
But if you want to use parts of other GPL-covered programs by other authors in your code, you cannot authorize the exception for them. You have to get the approval of the copyright holders of those programs. When other people modify the program, they do not have to make the same exception for their code—it is their choice whether to do so. If the libraries you intend to link with are nonfree, please also see the section on writing Free Software which uses nonfree libraries.
If you're using GPLv3, you can accomplish this goal by granting an additional permission under section 7. The following license notice will do that. You must replace all the text in brackets with text that is appropriate for your program.
If not everybody can distribute source for the libraries you intend to link with, you should remove the text in braces; otherwise, just remove the braces themselves. If you modify this Program, or any covered work, by linking or combining it with [name of library] or a modified version of that library , containing parts covered by the terms of [name of library's license] , the licensors of this Program grant you additional permission to convey the resulting work.
If you're using GPLv2, you can provide your own exception to the license's terms. Again, you must replace all the text in brackets with text that is appropriate for your program. Linking [name of your program] statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on [name of your program]. In addition, as a special exception, the copyright holders of [name of your program] give you permission to combine [name of your program] with free software programs or libraries that are released under the GNU LGPL and with code included in the standard release of [name of library] under the [name of library's license] or modified versions of such code, with unchanged license.
Note that people who make modified versions of [name of your program] are not obligated to grant this special exception for their modified versions; it is their choice whether to do so. The GNU General Public License gives permission to release a modified version without this exception; this exception also makes it possible to release a modified version which carries forward this exception. Under the Berne Convention, everything written is automatically copyrighted from whenever it is put in fixed form.
However, registering the copyright in the US is a very good idea. It will give you more clout in dealing with an infringer in the US. The case when someone else might possibly claim the copyright is if you are an employee or student; then the employer or the school might claim you did the job for them and that the copyright belongs to them. Whether they would have a valid claim would depend on circumstances such as the laws of the place where you live, and on your employment contract and what sort of work you do.
It is best to consult a lawyer if there is any possible doubt. If you think that the employer or school might have a claim, you can resolve the problem clearly by getting a copyright disclaimer signed by a suitably authorized officer of the company or school.
Your immediate boss or a professor is usually NOT authorized to sign such a disclaimer. Many universities nowadays try to raise funds by restricting the use of the knowledge and information they develop, in effect behaving little different from commercial businesses. If you see any chance that your school might refuse to allow your program to be released as free software, it is best to raise the issue at the earliest possible stage. The closer the program is to working usefully, the more temptation the administration might feel to take it from you and finish it without you.
At an earlier stage, you have more leverage. But the copyright holder for a program can release it under several different licenses in parallel. The license that comes in your copy, assuming it was put in by the copyright holder and that you got the copy legitimately, is the license that applies to your copy. To release a nonfree program is always ethically tainted, but legally there is no obstacle to your doing this.
If you are the copyright holder for the code, you can release it under various different non-exclusive licenses at various times. Strictly speaking, the GPL is a license from the developer for others to use, distribute and change the program. However, if the developer does something that would violate the GPL if done by someone else, the developer will surely lose moral standing in the community.
No, because the public already has the right to use the program under the GPL, and this right cannot be withdrawn. Yes, because the copyright on the editors and tools does not cover the code you write. Using them does not place any restrictions, legally, on the license you use for your code.
Some programs copy parts of themselves into the output for technical reasons—for example, Bison copies a standard parser program into its output file.
In such cases, the copied text in the output is covered by the same license that covers it in the source code. Meanwhile, the part of the output which is derived from the program's input inherits the copyright status of the input.
That said, as I understand this question, you have been asked by a third party to do some commercial website development, the website to be hosted on drupal, and the work to include some modifications to the drupal system itself yes, I know you said According to the bottom of this page , drupal 8 the current version is distributed under GPLv2.
This gives us three separate issues: content you create for publishing via your modified drupal system, your modifications to the drupal core itself, and drupal modules you create. Firstly as I understand it, content you create for your client is not covered by drupal's licence.
The basis on which this work is available to your client is up for agreement between the two of you. If you don't want your client to be able to sell it on, and you want to be able to reuse it yourself, you will need to ensure the agreement conveys only a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use a single copy of this content.
In some jurisdictions, you may need to address the issue of works for hire. Frankly, you should get a lawyer. Secondly any modifications you make to the drupal core are pretty clearly covered by the core's licence. GPLv2 section 2b says that. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: [ This distribution or publishing happens when you give your core modifications to the client.
As I understand it, drupal is written in PHP, which is an interpreted, not a complied language. If you can persuade the client to pay for modifications which you host in perpetuity, then I think you may keep them secret; but I also think your client would be an idiot for signing such a contract.
Thirdly , modifications you make to drupal by way of custom modules are difficult. Even if drupal were a compiled product, the licence status of code that is linked into GPLed code remains an open question; some say that it constitutes a derivative work, and therefore the GPL covers your modifications, while others say that it doesn't. That drupal is an interpreted, not a compiled, product certainly doesn't make things simpler, and may complicate them more.
My personal feeling is that you are on safest ground assuming that your module is covered by drupal's licence; therefore you should treat it the same as modifications to the core, and either give it to the client under GPLv2, or host it yourself - but that is just my uninformed feeling on the matter.
Be sure to check the links at the bottom of this post for more details. With that said, dear TechRepublic reader, the short answer to your first question is: yes, you can legally sell software with a GPL license version 2 or 3 for whatever price you want to charge.
The GNU project itself "encourages people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can You can charge nothing, a penny, a dollar, or a billion dollars. It's up to you, and the marketplace. Please note that "as much as you wish" only applies to the executable form of the software, not its source code. This is explained in subsections 6a and 6b of the GPL : if you want to sell a binary copy of a GPL software program, you must include either its complete source code or a written, formal offer valid at least three years to provide it to whoever possesses the binary.
In more detail, you have to provide:. Of course, all users of free software enjoy these same freedoms. The people to whom you sold copies of GPL software are just as free as you are to make copies and sell them for whatever price they feel is right, including a price equal to zero.
There are two kinds of contributor agreements. In a Contributor License Agreement CLA , the original contributor retains copyright ownership of their contributions, but grants the project a broad set of rights such that the project can incorporate and distribute the contributions as it needs to.
In a Copyright Assignment Agreement CAA , the contributor actually transfers copyright ownership of the contributions to the project, who can then license it however they want since they own it but a CAA typically grants very broad non-exclusive rights back to the contributor so that they too can use, distribute, sublicense etc their contribution freely. With both CLAs and CAAs, it is of course necessary that "the project" be some kind of legal entity able to enter into agreements.
Sometimes the project is incorporated itself, usually as a non-profit entity; sometimes it is represented by an umbrella non-profit organization such as the Apache Software Foundation or the Software Freedom Conservancy ; sometimes a for-profit corporation considers itself the main sponsor of the project and requests contributor agreements in order to manage the development community and maintain a public distribution of the software in question.
For more about contributor agreements in general, and some examples, see civiccommons. See also the Project Harmony , " Definitely not! This isn't even about Open Source, really: in general, you should not remove a valid copyright notice, no matter what license it specifies.
Copyright notices are legal notices; they are also a source of information about the provenance of source code, and if that information is stripped out, recipients of downstream copies have no easy way to rediscover it. Sometimes you can; it depends on the Open Source license. Authors often want you to be able to do this, so most shared libraries are licensed under a permissive license or one that allows linking under certain circumstances e.
A very small number of libraries use the GPL , which only allows linking with proprietary works if the licensor grants an explicit exception. Thus, you are wise to check the licenses that your program links to. The community expects that all code linked to GPL code will be licensed under the GPL, even if the link is made at runtime using a shared library.
As long as you own that source code, all that you need to do is choose one of the approved Open Source licenses , include a copy of the license text, typically in a filenamed "COPYRIGHT", including a statement saying that you are licensing the code under that copyright, and give it to somebody else! Of course, you probably want to give it to a lot of people in order to gain the maximum benefit from giving away your code.
A number of websites will help you do that: berlios. While languages like PHP , Perl or Python have implementations that are licensed under Open Source licenses, that doesn't turn all code written in these languages or run under such implementations into Open Source. The code written in such languages or run under such implementations would need to be licensed under an approved Open Source license in order to be Open Source. Colloquially, to "distribute" a program means to give someone else a copy of its code — either its source code, or its binary executable code, or both.
Merely allowing people to invoke a program on your server, for example via networked API calls, does not constitute distribution of the program as generally understood. To avoid confusion, some licenses use the terms "propagate" and "convey" instead of "distribute". Propagation includes copying, distribution with or without modification , making available to the public, and in some countries other activities as well.
The definition for "convey" narrows it down, however: " Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying. In a legal context, you may wish to use similar precision. Not all programs have separate source and binary forms. For programs written in so-called "scripting" languages there is generally only a source code form though sometimes compressed, for example via the minification often performed on Javascript code prior to distribution.
But other programming languages are typically compiled to an architecture-specific executable form and can optionally be distributed as executables without source code. The distinction between source code and executable form is important for understanding the terms and conditions of some open source licenses, so if you don't have the necessary technical background, you should consult someone who does.
The Open Source Initiative is not a legal services organization and generally cannot help you when someone is violating a copyleft license. However, as of late , one of the organizations below may be able to help note that most of the enforcement they do is about the GNU GPL and AGPL licenses, though in theory they can help enforce other copyleft licenses too :.
You can sell services based on the code i. The only kind of profit strategy that is incompatible with Open Source is monopoly-based sales, also known as "royalties". See this article for how to think about business strategies that make money from Open Source. Also, this survey of open source leaders including many OSI Directors provides several business models for Free and Open Source software.
Yes, you can. But depending on the license, you probably can't stop your customers from selling it in the same manner as you. See the commercial use for more details. No, at least not any more than they could otherwise. Open Source is about software source code, not about identity. That is, letting people use your code under an Open Source license is not the same as letting them use your trademarks or other identifying attributes, except insofar as they would be permitted to anyway for example, in nominative use doctrine.
There are many companies and other organizations that release open source code while exercising tight control over their trademarks. Trademarks and other marks of attribution are primarily about preventing public confusion over identity and provenance, and therefore trademark regulation is useful in Open Source software in the same way it is useful generally.
Alas, no, it is a trademark and we need to retain control over it. Please see our Trademark and Logo Usage guidelines.
You can always use a trademark in a truthful manner to refer accurately to an entity. Yes, but you don't have to ask permission. It's always okay to link to anybody 's site. Linking to something is like saying its name and address out loud. Generally, yes. Look at the bottom of each page for the Creative Commons License.
That gives you fairly broad permission to re-use the material; read the license to see the exact permissions. The best place to discuss an issue about an open source license, or about a potential open source license, is on our license-discuss mailing list, about which you can read more on our mailing lists page.
You do not have to be subscribed to post, but posts from non-members are moderated solely to prevent spam , so please be patient if it takes a few days for your first post to show up. For questions about submitting new licenses, you may also want to read about the license approval process.
We are not a legal services organization and we can't give you legal advice. If you want legal advice, you need to have an attorney-client relationship with a lawyer. Even if the lawyer is pro bono , there still needs to be a formal client arrangement. Without giving you legal advice, we can still give you advice about community norms and expectations. It won't be legal advice, but you may find it useful when talking with your lawyer or, if necessary, coming to a decision without the help of a lawyer.
The OSI's work, and thus funding support, focuses on the creation and curation of resources that enable, promote, and protect open source software development, adoption, and communities.
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