Caveat: I am not a lawyer. So, nothing in my reply should be construed as advice from a person practising law.
On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 1:48 PM, S Suresh <[email protected]> wrote: > 1) > > Installing & supporting the opensource software (majorly GPLv3 licence, > GPLv2, apache, other licences too) to the customer , is it legal? > Here support means - configuration & admistration support? What you are planning to do is engaging in a service provider agreement with the customer where the scope of the contract/agreement includes installing specific software, configuring it according to the production environment and, providing support for administering. This has specifically nothing much to do with GPL (or, any other license that your software stack will have). <http://opensource.org/faq#commercial> > 2) > Customizing the opensource software. (Note: I will send the customization > to the software mailing group. Here the group may reject this or take this > or put on hold to make it on official delivery) > But, still i can use the customized software to my customer? > And install & support the customized software to customer? > > Is it legal? The answer to this depends on the definition of "customization". <http://opensource.org/faq#linking-proprietary-code> would be a link that would be useful. However, if your contract with the client does not prohibit it, you are always welcome to put your patches to the upstream project and, follow their processes for making it a part of a future release. If you customer is intending to provide the software to others ie. you are an application developer providing services to a client who desires to make a commercial offering from the combined product (application+custom_patches) then you'd want to read the FAQ I've linked to. > 3) Writing documentation for the usage of opensource software and share it > with customers? > > Making money out of those items (1,2,3) , is it legal? Yes. Again this is a services agreement ie. documentation services. -- sankarshan mukhopadhyay <https://twitter.com/#!/sankarshan> _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc ILUGC Mailing List Guidelines: http://ilugc.in/mailinglist-guidelines
