Talking Drupal #132 - Drupal Licensing and GPL

Talking Drupal

Recorded the day after the US Presidential Election, John , Nick and I were a bit tired after watching election results throughout the night, but energized for a discussion with Kevin Reynen about Drupal Licensing. A recent community ‘conversation’ between WordPress and Wix sparked our interest to talk about the GPL. If you are making money on Open Source software, you should pay attention to licensing.

Watch or listen

Show Notes

• What is the Drupal Licensing Working Group?
• Everything committed to Drupal repo has to be compatible with GPL v2
• What is the GPL? Based on Richard Stallman’s set of four freedoms:
  • The freedom to run the program, for any purpose
  • The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish
  • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
  • The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions, giving the community a chance to benefit from your changes
• What is the difference between copyright and licensing
  • You can claim copyright of a module you write, which means the others must attribute you are the source of original author. The GPL allows other to distribute and modify that code.
• What does distribution mean and what triggers the distribution clause?
  • As is relates to work for hire
  • As is related to SaaS
  • As is relates to the contract you are hired under
  • Distribution vs Convery
• Can you sell a module or theme? YES!
• Licensing - Drupal interfacing with other products (licenses) - ie. FontAwesome, CiviCRM, CKEditor in Core, AMP
• Major differences between GPL v2 and GPL v3, AGPL
• GPL and the use of GitHub
• Distributions, Drupal 8, Composure and licensing
• How is licensing monitored
• Wordpress and Wix recap

Resources

• GPL Version 2
• Drupal Licensing FAQ
• Blog post from Matt at Wordpress

Hosts

Stephen Cross - www.ParallaxInfoTech.com @stephencross

John Picozzi - www.oomphinc.com @johnpicozzi

Nic Laflin - www.nLightened.net @nicxvan

Guests

Kevin Reynen - http://www.colorado.edu/@kreynen