• Howdy! Welcome to our community of more than 130.000 members devoted to web hosting. This is a great place to get special offers from web hosts and post your own requests or ads. To start posting sign up here. Cheers! /Peo, FreeWebSpace.net
managed wordpress hosting

legal question

pdrucker

New Member
if i were to take an open source cms such as mambo, xoops, phpnuke ect. and make a mod for it, would it be legal to sell the cms with the mod integrated? kind of like the way fedora/suse make linux distros with only part of the software being theirs.
 
You MAY distribute it and charge for that service. You MAY change it, add design and content to it and you MAY charge for that. You may NOT alter the license and you must NOT alter the copyright. You do NOT have to show a 'Powered by Mambo' graphic, as it not a copyright notice.

In other words, you must NOT pretend that Mambo is yours, and you must NOT charge people for Mambo. Use Mambo to empower yourself and your clients by taking away the 'Black Magic' that surrounds putting content on the internet. Charge for the value you add and not for the hard work that Miro, the Mambo Development Team and the Mambo community have put into it.
http://www.mamboserver.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=49&Itemid=86

So you cant re-sell it under your own name

You can make some addons but can only charge for the addon itself, not mambo. mambo must be kept mambo


( Fesdora/Suse charge your fot the installation cd, not linux itself )
 
Last edited:
Illegal, no.

Immoral, yes.

You're getting mambo for free, so why not give back and release the mod for free.
Rather selfish if you ask me.
 
Anything that's under the GPL you can sell as you wish, but you have to make the source code available free -- including the new source you've added to it -- which for a script makes selling it rather impractical since you're not selling binaries. (I suppose you could make an installation script under a different license, in theory, and hope people would pay... though anyone could make a new install script for it that'd be free. And you can always make people pay for support, naturally.)

Note that if the modification is kept entirely seperate from the script it wouldn't have to be GPLed, but the moment you distribute it integrated with Mambo your modification becomes GPLed.
 
Last edited:
When you combine the two scripts you still have to give people the option of downloading the source including your own added source for free -- I don't know if Mambo cares about enforcing that, but those are the terms of GPL.
 
Back
Top