This topic will be of interest to many people across various organizations today who are deliberating on whether to adopt drupal or not and if so to what extent.
We are a group of Drupal enthusiasts within a large IT services provider interested in using the drupal platform to configure and create simple tools to help the various teams within the organization in day to day activities.
We did create one such simple tool recently by downloading some modules (Ex: taxonomy, CCK etc) and configuring them (no code was built, except some snippets that were downloaded from the web to drive the display of blocks, menus etc as part of the configuration process) . However when it came to rolling-out the tool, we seem to have run into a tussle with our legal team because of the GPL license associated with drupal.
Their problem seems to be centered around the following:
1. Drupal being a GPL based software, any work that is created using it, even though it is "configurations only", will create a legal exposure/violation to our organization (even though there is no code that we have written and there is nothing really to contribute to the community!)
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Sharing this tool with our customer-organizations (non-fee basis) in a joint usage format (both our org as well as members from customer org will use the tool), bears a legal risk to both organizations
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Any other proprietary tool (non GPL based) cannot transfer data in the form of a feed (flat file) to/from this drupal based tool, as that would mean that code for the proprietary tool would also have to become GPL.
Based on our interpretation of the terms & conditions of GPL, the above should not result in any legal violations.
Need your inputs to understand where we stand on the above.
Thanks
Comments
Sorry, but your legal
Sorry, but your legal department should take some time to read about the GPL and not rely on hearsay.
The "arguments" they've fed you are solely FUD.
Untrue
Your legal department is wrong. They're probably just ignorant of how the GPL works and so trying to cover their butts.
The GPL applies to the code of the software. It does not apply to data that the code happens to manipulate. 99% of Drupal configuration is data, not code.
Data that you store and manage using Drupal is unaffected by the GPL.
Data that you feed into Drupal from a 3rd party system using a non-executable format (CSV, RSS, SOAP, pretty much anything other than directly calling PHP functions) is unaffected by the GPL.
3rd party systems that feed data into or pull data from Drupal are unaffected by the GPL.
Consider that if their over-broad interpretation were true, every web browser that accessed data from a Drupal web site would have to be released under the GPL. That's clearly not the case.
If you write new code (modules) for your Drupal site and do not distribute it outside of your organization, then you are under no obligation to distribute anything to anyone outside of your organization. If you do distribute the site you built, including your additional code, to someone outside your organization, the only obligation on you is that Drupal and your additional code be licensed to them under the GPL, not any other license. You are under no obligation to give the code to anyone else besides that person. The only caveat is that you are not allowed to prevent them from modifying it or distributing it to someone else if they choose. That does not apply to any other code in your organization, however. Only to the Drupal code you write and distribute. (The same is true of any other GPL software you work with.)
Really, the only way you could "get in trouble" licensing-wise is if someone copied code from Drupal into another of your internal applications, and then tried to release that other application under something other than the GPL. That would be a copyright violation. That's no different than any other license, though. Try to do that with a proprietary application and you get sued. Try to do that with GPLed code and we insist that you either stop or release the affected code (and only the affected code, not other applications in your organization) under the GPL. We prefer the latter. :-)
I suggest pointing your legal folks at http://www.softwarefreedom.org, the Software Freedom Law Center. They have a lot of articles on the GPL and how it impacts other code. These are the lawyers who wrote GPLv3. :-)
--Larry Garfield
Director of Legal Affairs
Drupal Association Board of Directors