[Neos] Rebranding Neos and Licensing

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi,

First, I'm not a lawyer and for companies that want to be certain about 
the impact of their products it is very wise to consult a lawyer who is 
experienced in copyright laws for software products.

On 1-5-2014 11:29, Dominique Feyer wrote:
> 1. How do you feel about a partially rebranded Neos ? What about any
> licensing issue about that ?

For TYPO3 CMS there were extensions in TER which helped change the 
styling of the backend login screen. Nobody ever made any problems of 
these extensions.
The current version of CMS has settings that allows you to change 
certain images (logos) and styling of the backend login. The product 
seems to allow such modifications.
I don't see how the situation would be different for Neos.

> 2. What about any problems with the GPL licensing of Neos ? A lots of
> our application code are proprietary. We will release some decoupled
> packages, but the main part of the application business logic will
> stay proprietary. With TYPO3 Flow it’s not an issue as we use the
> LGPL, but with Neos the GPL is a viral license. In our case it’s a
> risk.

The licenses like GPL have been created in a time when software used to 
be distributed, compiled and then created output.
Compiled versions of the software would also be distributed and these 
included the libraries they depended upon.

With web based applications the situation changed. You don't distribute 
any software in a Saas environment.
People who wrote proprietary code for use as a website also wondered how 
the GPL license of MySQL and the PHP license would affect them. In the 
end it turned out that they didn't distribute any of those tools and 
that even the dependency on the MySQL client inside PHP didn't result in 
a requirement to purchase a commercial license.

If you don't distribute software, but only provide an online service I 
don't expect problems with any GPL.
If you publish your software, but don't distribute the software you 
depend upon, there shouldn't be a problem either.

Please do consult a lawyer to be more certain; it's an area where 
nothing is set in stone, but at least you can estimate the chances of 
getting in trouble.

-- 
Jigal van Hemert
TYPO3 CMS Active Contributor

TYPO3 .... inspiring people to share!
Get involved: typo3.org