Hi Team,
I'm new to Drupal development and its legal issues related to GPL licensing, so, please read through my doubts/concerns and guide me in the best proper way possible.
We (as a team of Drupal developers) work for a service-providing company. Here, we utilize Drupal for few clients, using core and innumerable contrib modules.
We create multiple custom modules and a custom theme, which may or may not be derivatives of Drupal core/contrib modules/themes. Also, during code deployments to any environment, its full source-code is deployed to the client servers for the custom functionalities to work seamlessly. This is in adherence to the question #12 of Drupal licensing - "Is an agency, or service provider 'distributing code' on behalf of a client when under contract?".
Our intention is to write custom modules/themes for different clients as a service provider only, and not to distribute such Drupal/PHP/HTML/CSS/JS code as contrib modules/themes to Drupal community for now.
Questions/Concerns:-
- As long as we just use Drupal core and contrib modules, along with configurations changes in its Admin section, we are adhering to GPL, right? Do we need to share any such configurations as PHP code? If yes, can you please share the details of this process?
- Since we're not contributing anything to Drupal community as of now with our custom modules/themes, do these custom modules/themes need to be in accordance to GPL? Or can they still be non-GPL based?
- If the answer to the last question is "yes", then please share a link where all the details are available so that we can adhere to GPL policies for such custom modules/themes.
- For any such custom modules/themes, is it mandatory to release its source-code to Drupal community as a contrib module/theme?
Appreciate all of your time and help in guiding us on the right track, Thank you!
Comments
I am not a lawyer but I
I am not a lawyer but I received some education about free software licenses.
As long as you distribute your code and the all the contrib modules licensed as GPL to your client you are not violating it.
Your client then has the freedom to distribute that code under the GPL and run it in its servers.
Thanks for your comment,
Thanks for your comment, Rodrigo!
I'm still confused by your statement "As long as you distribute your code and the all the contrib modules licensed as GPL to your client you are not violating it."
Because question #12 of Drupal license page states that:-
Do you mean that the custom modules/themes developed as part of "our code" need to be licensed as GPL? Or only the contrib modules need to be part of GPL license?
The target category of "code" in terms of either "contrib" or "custom" is very fuzzy in the Drupal license page.
Best Regards!
The code that you use that is
The code that you use that is GPL you give it to your client(not the public) as GPL.
Then the code that you write can be licensed freely. Some will argue that this code integrates tightly with Drupal therefore is forced to be also licensed as GPL-compatible but AFAIK no court have decided about this or similar (A wordpress plugin, a theme, etc) case. Different case than a linux module for example.
So "contrib" is licensed as GPL but you are not forced to release modifications as long as you don't distribute it to the public (and executing php on a server is not distributing to the public). With "custom" modules you can license them as you see fit and you are not forced to publish your code.
A different case will be JS on a public server that is licensed as GPL. In case you modify this files and serve them as uglified versions you are required to publish you modifications to the public (an announced public URL with the code will be enough).