Posted by tsvenson on September 9, 2014 at 2:24pm
Would be grateful for a clarification on how I can use Drupal Core, and other d.o hosted projects, for a site I'm building.
I am going to host this as an open source project on github so anyone either can participate or simply just use it for own needs. However, I also want to remove certain files from core, in particular most of the text-files in the root folder.
Can I do that without violating GPL? Everything will be documented in the project wiki with direct links to where the full official archives are available.
Comments
When you say "most" of the
When you say "most" of the text files do you mean all of them including the LICENSE.txt?
If so you probably should put a license, or a link to the license, somewhere else in the project such as a README.md file.
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
The license documents will be
The license documents will be left in the repo. Not only for core, but for all contribs and other third party projects too. Those I see as important to help avoid confusion, particularly if/when other licenses than GPL is used for non d.o projects.
The README.md will contain info about this and also point to for example the wiki-pages on github containing details about the sources for individual components etc.
My thinking is that GPL allows me to modify as I want, as long as I comply and make my modifications available etc. Thus removing for example the original install and readme files, that are no longer valid to get a site using this repo properly up and running, should not be a problem.
--
/thomas
T: @tsvenson | S: tsvenson.com
GPL tells you what you can and cannot do
I don't see any problem with what you propose to do.
GPLv2 is tells you what you what you can and cannot do if you modify a distribution.
If I've understood it correctly, you don't plan to alter any source code, just remove (or replace) some of the text files in the repo (e.g. readme and install files).
Removing an replacing files do make a up a drifferent distribution does not conflict the GPL. GPL does not require you to deliver everything you received downstream, just to tell downstream recipients where you got it from (so they can access the originals if they prefer), and to document that you've changed it.
Adding files are also fine. Just plain text files in the repo such as
README.txtthat is never touched by the code is exempt from the license and under GPL you can do pretty much anything you want with them. Here is the relevant language from GPLv2:And as greggles already said, license documents must be kept intact in the repo.