Making a personal profit

Uh-oh! A tricky subject I know, but I’d like to know what the restrictions are with the MODx license. This is because I’ve honestly seen GPL interpreted a number of ways to suit people’s needs, so I thought I’d ask before getting into deep water as it were.

I’m a web designer/developer and am just getting to grips with MODx after tinkering with it this morning and wondering why I’ve not found it earlier

Now obviously when I design and build websites for business clients, I need to make a profit. The GPL license would restrict me from selling MODx as a package obviously (plus it would be plain wrong as it’s not mine to sell) but am I right in thinking I can charge for the time taken to install it etc and bill the client that way?

Also, with regards to modules and plugins written to work with MODx - since they interact with MODx do I therefore have to release them under GPL for everyone to use?

Am I obliged to share the modules I write (some of them would be very specific for specific business uses and as such not really useful for anyone else, and others I’d just like to keep to myself).

Finally, since I’ve taken the time to code my module/plugin/whatever, but bearing in mind they interact with MODx which is GPL licensed, am I still legally allowed to charge the client for the time taken to write the code?

I know it kind of goes against the whole ethos of GPL to be trying to charge anything for anything related to such a product, but MODx right out of the box covers the basics (and then some) and is a good base to launch into more complex projects, so there we are.

All answers welcome, especially from the devs.

I certainly look forward to using MODx with some of my personal sites and my own business site whatever the response to the replies above

EDIT - Sorry! Didn’t mean to post this in the support forum. I must have clicked the wrong link, though it’s sort of a support enquiry.

There are many people now making a living from implementing sites with MODx, myself included. Feel free to join the list. RedHat is GPL software and they charge for the distribution. You can charge $1,000,000 for the CD it’s on, you just need to find someone willing to pay that.

Your own personal code does not have to be released as GPL, but you do walk a fine line to self-alienation if it becomes an all-take-and-no-give-back affair. There’s over 10,000 hours and more than that figure in real USD over the last 2 years in getting MODx to 095. That was all given freely by the core team and benefits the community in general we hope. Donations to date still don’t even cover the monthly hosting costs.

The GPL does not restrict your ability to make a living or charge for your work/implementing sites/installing/packaging a distribution/etc. The whole issue of copyrights and licenses is a very complex subject and has been hashed over on virtually every OS project, and until there’s a lot of solid case law examples backing it up, it’ll likely remain open for interpretation.

Thanks very much for clarifying Ryan. This was exactly what I’d hoped to hear, and what I’ve heard elsewhere (in those places where people actually understand GPL and not the few places I’ve been where folks think anything you do HAS to be GPL’ed as well or else ).

I’d certainly be more than happy to make donations for the occasions where the code is a bit more client specific and unlikely to be of benefit (or use - my PHP isn’t that great ) to others. I should even be able to make a donation per site I install it on so I don’t feel as bad about it.

Just one more question - does the MODx footer copyright have to remain in place or can that be removed? Again, I realise it’s a bit rude to remove it, but I couldn’t find anywhere stating it was essential that it remain there.

Thanks for your answers so far! How much are the monthly hosting costs by the way and how much bandwidth do you guys get through? I’d imagine it’s a fair amount!

You *can* remove the copyright footers.

Making a donation per-site is a good way of going about things, as you can pretty much build it into your costs.

An additional way of contributing is to answer people’s questions on the forum, and to contribute to the wiki. It may be that you have a module that is specifically coded to your client’s requirements, but if someone else is thinking of doing something similar you can give advice on what you found works - possibly sharing lines of code, but not the whole thing.

You can sell GPL programs:

The GPL expressly permits one to sell copies of GPL-covered works and charge a download fee for them. Purchasing rather than downloading may make sense from a convenience standpoint, but it does not change either the purchaser’s or vendor’s rights or responsibilities under the GPL. In fact, licenses that only allow non-commercial distribution are automatically incompatible with the GPL.

[...]
The GPL does not give the licensee unlimited redistribution rights. The right to redistribute is granted only if the distribution includes the source code and is licensed under the terms of the GPL.
This requirement is known as copyleft. It earns its legal power from the use of copyright on software programs. Because a GPL work is copyrighted, a licensee has no right to modify or redistribute it (barring fair use), except under the terms of the license. One is only required to adhere to the terms of the GPL if one wishes to exercise rights normally restricted by copyright law, such as redistribution. Conversely, if one distributes copies of the work without abiding by the terms of the GPL (for instance, by keeping the source code secret), they can be sued by the original author under copyright law.

So if you distribute the GPL program to a third party (such as a client) you are required to send the changes back to the program’s creator: in our case , the ModX core team of developers(rule does not apply when the changes are for self-use).

The copyleft only applies when a person seeks to redistribute the program. One is allowed to make private modified versions, without any obligation to divulge the modifications as long as the modified software is not distributed to anyone else. Note that the copyleft only applies to the software and not to its output (unless that output is itself a derivative work of the program); for example, a public web portal running a modified derivative of a GPLed content management system is not required to distribute its changes to the underlying software.

About the modules/plugins: there is a very thin line when considering these. If these are considered derivates based on the ModX GPL licensed components, then the GPL states that they also have to be GPL licensed. If not then they may be licensed as the owned wants to , but another problem arises : you can not use non GPL compatible license with a GPL program. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_licenses for a list of compatible/incompatible licenses with GPL v2.

To sum it up:
You can sell ModX.
You can charge for installing/configuring it.
You can make modules/plugins and sell them to your clients, but in order for them to function with modx they should be GPL compatible ,and shared with the ModX creators. (However , this is a gray area , and I am not sure where these components fit in (dynamically linking issue) ... so it might actually be possible that you can distribute them under other licenses that might allow you to not share the code ).Examples in the real world that are on the same gray line exist ( see linux kernel and official Nvidia drivers ) and though they are considered illegal they still exist (weird enough).
Don’t trust my words as an advice on this issue though ...
You can charge for configuring modules.

For further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License
http://www.agimo.gov.au/_sourceit/sourceit/oss/legal_context (examples of situations )

PS: I am not an expert on this issue , and this post represents my view on these licensing issues.

SOFTWARE LICENSING, WHETHER OPEN SOURCE OR PROPRIETARY, IS A COMPLEX LEGAL AREA. APPROPRIATE LEGAL ADVICE SHOULD BE OBTAINED BEFORE ENTERING INTO A LICENCE AGREEMENT.

Good luck !
EDIT: the issue could be fixed in several ways: the ModX core team releasing a license that allows people to distribute ModX with proprietary modules , as long as they don’t change the core of ModX ,or any of the scripts it comes with ( if so , they still should report back the changes in the components that the ModX core team specifies in the license - so your modules will still be *yours only* ) and ofcourse incorporate some kind of copyleft in the license. Or they could distribute ModX under a commercial license that costs anywhere from 0.1$ to xxxx $ for commercial use .

Cheers for the additional info guys.

I would imagine it’s okay to charge for modules even if it’s a grey area as Ryan has basically stated it doens’t have to be GPL (and it’s good to get that kind of clarification from the dev team).

Paul - that’s just what I was thinking. It still seems a bit cheeky if I build in the donation fee, but at leasy MODx get’s something back. It’s quite likely that I’ll be attempting to pull data from forum software like IPB in the future, so things like that which would obviously be useful to the community I’d be happy to contribute to the project.

Geo88 - thanks for the clarification. I should have just gone to Wikipedia instead of trying to make sense of the GPL directly. Sometimes these licenses can be written in a slightly confusing manner

Slight correction....

Quote from: Geo88 at Dec 11, 2006, 12:11 PM

So if you distribute the GPL program to a third party (such as a client) you are required to send the changes back to the program’s creator: in our case , the ModX core team of developers(rule does not apply when the changes are for self-use).

That’s not true. If you distribute GPL licensed program (modified or not), you have to make the source code for that program available to the people who get the program (i.e., your clients) who in turn have the same right as you did with code, i.e., distributing it, etc. There’s no specific requirement to give the code modifications to the creators of the original code (although it’s obviously a nice thing to do).

On to a question that leads to unsteady ground - if you host the client’s site, it’s on your webspace, but it’s their site. So... is that distribution or not?

Quote from: Pete at Dec 13, 2006, 02:35 PM

On to a question that leads to unsteady ground - if you host the client’s site, it’s on your webspace, but it’s their site. So... is that distribution or not?

That is, by no doubt, hard to answer as non-lawyer, if they can access the files directly it’s no doubt distribution, but elsewise it’s hard to answer, perhaps you can consult a lawyer about it if it’s really important (I suppose it will only be when you create big modifications to the code)

Quote from: Pete at Dec 13, 2006, 02:35 PM

On to a question that leads to unsteady ground - if you host the client’s site, it’s on your webspace, but it’s their site. So... is that distribution or not?

I guess that depends. Generally in a work-for-hire situation, the client owns the code you develop (regardless of where it’s hosted) which is obviously a type of redistribution.