Where do I find more about licensing our own work?
Background: As virtuous as open-sourcing indeed is,
is publishing our own extensions open source mandatory? Are we also allowed to offer extensions e.g. for purchase, using our own way of licensing?
I am talking about site packages, templates, styles, plugins, etc for Neos.
P.S.: are there already commercial extensions available (stores / marketplaces)?
Good question. AFAIK, this hasn’t been a topic yet. I thought that this e-commerce package was a paid one, but it seems not: https://aimeos.org/flow-ecommerce-package/
My naive assumption is that it should also be possible for Neos to offer paid packages, analogous to e.g. WordPress, etc.
But I’m not sure about it…
From a pure licensing standpoint you have to separate Flow and Neos. Flow is licensed under MIT which means pretty much anything goes. Neos on the other hand is GPLv3 which is a copyleft license. As I am not a license lawyer it’s obviously hard to judge from what point on the copyleft would apply to a plugin. I think site packages should be fine as they usually are not directly using APIs but merely providing a set of configuration, templates and resources, but again not a lawyer. If you want to play it safe you can always dual license things.
as an example: Could Sitegeist have marketed the Monocle package as a paid extension with e.g. a for-purchase license per site that it’s used on?
Hey everybody,
I don’t really know, but some links for that topic on WordPress:
tl;dr: PHP code was assumed to be “derived”; Images and CSS not because it is simply delivered by the web server. Thus, the PHP portion of extensions was assumed to be GPL in the wordpress case, the Images/CSS in a theme not. However, the authors state this has not been proven in court yet.
@creative-resort If you plan to launch any of this commercial parts, I think best would be if you get in touch with the core team privately, e.g. via hello@neos.io - to explain your ideas and thoughts more specifically.
I personally would love if the Neos ecosystem would stay “open”; as that’s how we can most learn from each other, profit from each other, etc – and we all have spent an enormous amount of work in creating Neos in the open.
All the best,
Sebastian