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mlmitch | 5 years ago

It’s hard to know without digging into your your library, which I haven’t. Also, I’m not a lawyer so I won’t try to give you a legal opinion.

However, you should probably take this one seriously.

I recommend reading the book “Open Source for Business” by Heather Meeker if you are looking for background on open source licensing. It’s written in a way that’s really accessible to non-lawyers.

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santa_boy|5 years ago

Thank you for the book recommendation. As a startup exploring SaaS ideas using open source almost 90% of the time, I keep thinking about the licensing issues (most projects I use are MIT, GPL, AGPL licensed) and any potential restrictions about what I can or cannot do.

Selling those as-is projects as my own isn't the model. But, bringing together, customizing, adding functionalities and making them easy and useful to users is.

The speak to a lawyer route doesn't work and isn't practical for me. Hope this book gives me some direction to start off with.

jimsmart|5 years ago

> The speak to a lawyer route doesn't work and isn't practical for me.

With respect: licensing can be complex, particularly if one is new to it, and the ramifications of messing-up with a licensing issue like this could result in legal action against yourself / your project, at worst.

If speaking with a lawyer is not practical for you, you will need to be 100% certain that you know what you are doing with all of these different licenses, and fully understand their compatibilities / incompatibilities — or at some point you will very probably get bitten by this.

I'm not sure why you say this route "doesn't work". Because it certainly does — of course you would need to find a lawyer who has good knowledge of software licensing.