Legal

I would like to formally request an investigation into two members of the Drupal Association board who I believe have acted in a Conflicts-of-Interest with regards to DrupalCon Chicago. In addition I formally request the investigation of one member of the Drupal Association general assembly for the same.

I believe that these members of the Board and General Assembly have behaved in ways that not only run counter to basic morals of our community, but I believe that they have also potentially broken nonprofit tax law and have put the tax exempt status of the DA's 501(c)3 at risk.

I was wondering if there is any reason for trademarked projects (themes, modules, distros) possibly being excluded from drupal.org. It is a given that anything distributed on drupal.org must be GPL2+ but I am wondering if it can be trademarked.

I have had a look around the various policy documents and see nothing relating to trademarked projects. Most materials discuss the GPL or the Drupal trademark itself. Are there any others?

Hi,

I run an agency focusing on open source software, mostly Drupal, Magento Commerce etc. Magento have an interesting marketplace for commercial extensions, "Magento Connect". Magento is licensed OSL 3.0, but its extensions can be any type of license, e.g. GPL, OSL, commercial, etc.

What I want to discuss is a kind of "Drupal Connect" ecosystem, for commercial Drupal extensions. These extensions, like Magento Connect, would not be hosted on Drupal.org, but acquired from third party websites. But Drupal Connect simply brings them all together.

Hello all, I am an attorney in the U.S. and I also own and operate a few e-commerce retail sites running on Drupal with Ubercart. Currently my law practice is primarily focused on U.S. immigration law but I have some good friends that run a Drupal development shop (Commerce Guys) and I frequently help them out with contracts and other things they need for their business. I am far from a Drupal expert but I am pretty proficient and understand a lot of the issues related to web-development and e-commerce that affect both developers and site owners.

I understand from the GNU Licensing compatibility matrix (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility) that what I need to do is permissible. But I want to take a quick dip here to avoid headaches and wasted time/effort in the event that I misunderstand.

There is a widely used PHP class for Google maps that implements the JavaScript API v3. (The primary Drupal Google mapping modules are 'legacy dependent' with code bases written to API v2.) This API v3 library/class I want to use is licensed under LGPLv3.

I have a web service built on drupal which I would like to release as a bundled package with drupal core and a set of modules which I've created. I would release this code under the GPL, but would like to maintain a trademark on the name of the web service. Are there any legal issues with this? Do I need to make mention that the service is built on drupal? Thanks ahead of time for any help

Hi! I read the FAQ and found a post that is a similar case to ours but just wanted to confirm.

My question is simply does managed hosting constitute conveyance? I imagine a lot of folks will have similar questions as computing moves more toward a virtual and cloud hosting context.

In our case, we host our own Drupal instance, which contains custom modules and theme extensions we developed to meet the specific needs of our audience. We plan to release parts of the work we have developed to the open source community, but on a schedule we can support.

Sometimes I see that some people add copyright lines(as number of developers) to the first comment block of a source file.

I am wondering if that is the right way to do it, I mean, should I be doing that?(I guess not since big projects like views are not doing it) If not, can I delete that lines? (moving them to README.txt or somethign like that, naturally)

I also see that drupal project itself use a COPYRIGHT.txt, should I do that in my modules?