Redmine

I too would like some clarification

We are interested in adding EC2 deployment and management tools to red-mine for a possible service and would like to use red-mine as a base.

Redmine is licensed under the GPL. I would recommend reading the GPL to understand what this license implies.

Disclaimer: I have no legal authority and my answers below are my interputation of the license. You should consult an attorney or legal practitioner before continuing.

1. First question, can I use Redmine as hosted service for commercial purpose. User will pay nominal fees to use this service?

Yes because you would be charging for the hosting of Redmine and not the distribution of Redmine.

2. Can I modify Redmine with totally different user experience?

From what I understand it, you can but if you distrubate copies of it you must re-license your copies under the GPL and provide a public place to download the changes.

3. Can I remove copyright information from footer “Powered by Redmine © 2006-2008 Jean-Philippe Lang”?

I don't think so.

Eric

Disclaimer: I have no legal authority and my answers below are my interputation of the license. You should consult an attorney or legal practitioner before continuing.

3. Can I remove copyright information from footer “Powered by Redmine © 2006-2008 Jean-Philippe Lang”?

  I don't think so.

I'm not so sure that the GPL restricts the display

[sorry, too fast on Submit and I can't find the Edit button]

Here is the relevant info from the GPL v2 license:

  2. 
    a) ...
    b) ...
    c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively
    when run, you must cause it, when started running for such
    interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an
    announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a
    notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide
    a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under
    these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this
    License.  (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but
    does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on
    the Program is not required to print an announcement.)

The Mambo team seem to think that its OK to remove the license, but the PHP-Nuke team queried the Free Software Federation and got a different answer. While I absolutely agree that the copyright must stay in the source code I am wondering about the "Redmine" name and eventual logo.

• have it on every page and require it to stay there.
• make it optional on every page.
• require it to be listed somewhere on the site.
• don't require it at all.

The downside to requiring it on every page would be if someone was using it for unsavory (socially, politically, or legally) purposes, then the Redmine name and logo would be splashed everywhere. This is something like the Firefox issue that popped up a couple of years ago where Mozilla actually protected the "Firefox" brand and forced others to re-brand their software if they used a non-official build and is the reason that Debian ships with the Iceweasel browser.

Disclaimer II: I too am seriously thinking about monetizing Redmine and would like a definitive answer to this question.

Later...
Richard

Good to see a constructive discussion on licensing issue.

I have gone through GPL v2 very closely and I interpretation is that I must keep the copyright information of the original code if I modify any pertaining code and distribute to other person. In a hosted application scenario, this clause doesn't qualified as there no distribution of modified code. In GPL, there is no mention of terms where a person is hosting a open source project and allowing other users to use it without distributing the code. This leads to the big confusion. And so most developers of open source project put additional clause for using open source solution for commercial purpose.

1. You cannot modify the footer copyright information as all.
2. You can remove the copyright information from footer (which render in all pages) but you should keep copyright somewhere in the application (like in about page)
3. Some author provide commercial licensing price. You pay the price and host the removed copyright information application.
4. Some authors give permission to host open source application without copyright information (like in Pligg or wordpress) but they do ask to keep copyright if they distribute the code to other. Here are few links.
Link (wordpress): http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=5800
Link (pligg): http://forums.pligg.com/general-help/573-favicon-copyright-questions.html

My basic purpose of this discussion is to explore if there is any commercial license available for Redmine and I look forward to continue this discussion.

Thanks

Interesting topic. I am also interested to provide hosted Redmine with other services like SVN, Billing etc. and don't mind paying for commercial license. As there is no official response from Redmine on licensing issue, I am assuming that Jean is not keen in commercializing Redmine. Other alternative could be http://www.dotproject.net/....PHP/MySQL..

Interesting topic. We do provide commercial hosting of online project management solution based on Redmine and we keep original copyright footer to give proper credit to Redmine author. You can take a look at us at PMP HQ http://www.pmphq.com

I am not interested in commercial hosting of Redmine, but would like to change the footer to just "Powered by Redmine", with "Redmine" linking to redmine.org. I think it's much more catchy and will lead more people to check it out.

Is this allowed with GPL?

Hi everybody

I am going to implement Redmine for incident tracking at my company but my company is an audit company so my boss asked me to search for an official information about Commercial License as we will be audited by our partners on the tools we are using. Could you please share about this?

Hue Nguyen