Making a personal profit

Quote from: vbrilon at Dec 13, 2006, 02:12 PM

Slight correction....
[...]
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).

Sorry for the mistake then .
May his Noodly Appendage touch you !

So, if we take this as a form of distribution, I would have to tell the client "by the way, your site is being run on MODx, a free and open source program, the source of which you can get for yourself at www.modxcms.com" and advise them to read the license to view their rights etc?

Meh, that’s no biggy. As long as I’ve explained to them that I’m not charging for the CMS itself it shouldn’t be a problem. I just don’t want to get it wrong you see, but at the same time I don’t want to have to pay a lawyer to look over it as in my mind that goes against GPL being there to make things easier

There’s a dozen ways to sell your coding and design services and still use open source software, such as "If I hadn’t used MODx your project would be costing twice as much" which isn’t even stretching the truth that much. If I had to code a bespoke CMS for each client it would cost them a lot and take me about three times as long to do.



Anywho, whatever I do, I do plan on giving back to MODx. If I ever end up building a business site for a client using MODx then I’ll donate money. If this program ends up running my gaming site (it’s a very strong contender so far as it can easily handle the hundred or so pages on the current site!) then there may be a few IPB forum snippets turning up sooner or later.

In fact, I’m already rather impressed by it, so if it ends up running some of my other sites, there may even be myBB snippets and MyTopix snippets too in future!

Quote from: Pete at Dec 14, 2006, 02:14 AM

As long as I’ve explained to them that I’m not charging for the CMS itself it shouldn’t be a problem.

Whether you charge them for GPL code or give it to them doesn’t change your rights (or theirs) under the GPL. The money is an irrelevant issues here.
The GPL ensures that people that use your code have the same rights, and can benefit from it, the same way you did.

I get that, but it would be stupid to try and charge them for something they can blatantly see is free

What I’m really asking is how do I ensure they know what their rights are? Is a link to this site (so they can download the source if they want to, since I’d be installing it on a server where they couldn’t actually access the source directly) and a link to the full GPL terms sufficient to comply with the terms of the GPL?

RedHat doesn’t seem to think it’s stupid.

A copy of the GPL is in a file called license.txt, is included in the assets/docs folder. The comments in the head of the index.php files indicates this. That, and free access to the code or a link to where it can be obtained is all that is required of you. If you are actually hacking the MODx core code, all you need to do is make the source available to the client. They do have ftp access, don’t they? You haven’t encrypted the code, have you? Then they automatically have access.

I used to charge $50 for installing software that the customer either already owned a CD for, or purchased, and they didn’t complain about it. You are not charging for the software (MODx in this case) but for installing, configuring, and templating it on their website. What you are doing is saving them the extra cost of purchasing commercial CMS software that you cannot modify to adjust to the needs of the client.

My clients generally aren’t tech savvy so they don’t get FTP access, which is why I was asking about the link back to this site. So, a link back to this site and a copy of the license file should be fine - that’s great

Stupid might have been the wrong word looking backat ym post - it’d certainly be cheeky

Thanks again guys.

Since I work for a big company that makes various software, starting from free GPL/Open Source systems to many million $ solutions, I could give you an advice.

When you work with GPL software license, or whatever the license it is all about the rights. It does not involve any action. I mean, you have to give the right to your customer to use your source code, although you don’t need to FORCE them to use it. By default, everything you develop with most of the scripting languages is deployed to the customer’s system as source code, since it is not compiled. If you give the copy of your solution to the customer, you will give them all PHP files and SQL scripts, and you obviously give all the source. So, no issues here. You will place GPL license somewhere there, and that’s it. Nobody will read it anyway, and they’ll just press "I agree" like everybody does. Normally, you sell your services to the people that are not programmers and they do not care about those things. Programmers will not buy it from you, they will download MODx and customize it themselves.

So, as long as you provide your code the the customer (which is normally the case, anyway) you are GPL compliant and you will not have the trouble from the client side.

GPL is actually protecting them against you! This is why you don’t have to worry about that.

You would run into problems only if you do something like this (e.g.) - I buy the complete solution from you for my company. I pay $xyz. You give me the system including all the PHP files, SQL, and license. After a year or so, I decide to change a few of your and/or MODx original files (not likely to happen, because I would ask for your support, because you have built the site). At the end, you freak out because of that and you start a legal issue, i.e. you put me on court. Than, you loose !!! Because I have a GPL ;-)

You got it? It’s all OK for everybody unless YOU YOURSELF want to make a problem.

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What you were saying about hosting a Web site at your machines, it does not concern any GPL issues, because you sell the service of HOSTING in that case, and it has nothing to do with the software. In that case you are the end user of MODx. All the others are using your solution on temporary basis - if they don’t pay for the hosting they will loose the Web site too. Otherwise, you will sell the solution for hosting on the other provider’s HW, but then you will deliver the source code too. I mean - you don’t need to give them the FTP access to the source code.
Think about this other way - have you ever paid for the hosting to another provider? Probably yes... They had facilities such as Apache, PHP, MySQL, Linux, etc. How many times were you provided with full source code of e.g. Fedora Core 5, MySQL 4.1.7, etc by your provider?
So, you know... That’s hosting - your clients RENT a solution from you and you don’t have any obligations with software licenses there.

I hope this helps

Igor Obradovic

Thanks very much - those examples helped greatly

Here’s an example to illustrate my questions: You use modx to write produce a web site for a client. You develop a number of new and unique snippets for them, to their requirements. You give all code to them by uploading it to their server (or you host it yourself, in which case they’d still have a claim on the snippets that they paid for).

Are the snippets GPL?

If all code is under the GPL, someone could approach them and ask for all the source code that powers their website, snippets included. So they pay for a great bit of functionality to make their site unique, and they have to give it any competitor that asks?

In other words, when does a snippet become part of modx and hence subject to the GPL? A snippet could include php code that doesn’t even interact with the modx API. So surely that doesn’t have to be GPL’d. But if a snippet calls even one php function from the modx API, does it have to be GPL’d?

They only need to become GPL if you distribute them. Nobody can come up to you and demand them. That is one of the common misunderstandings of the GPL.