Hi,
we would like to use CKEditor in a textarea in our commercial application but the licensing options (GPL, LGPL, and MPL) are all but clear.
Our application is an online application where users can create an account to start their own webshop.
In the backend, users would be able to use CKEditor to help them type descriptions etcetera for their webshop products.
The licence page says that it's possible for commercial applications to use any of the GPL, LGPL, and MPL licenses so my question is: can we use CKEditor in our app or not?
If we use it, we will simply use it to put bold, italic, and a couple of other CKEditor buttons on a textarea for text formatting. We won't be hacking or changing the code in any way.
Can somebody give us a clear answer on this question? Thanks a lot in advance!
jorre
we would like to use CKEditor in a textarea in our commercial application but the licensing options (GPL, LGPL, and MPL) are all but clear.
Our application is an online application where users can create an account to start their own webshop.
In the backend, users would be able to use CKEditor to help them type descriptions etcetera for their webshop products.
The licence page says that it's possible for commercial applications to use any of the GPL, LGPL, and MPL licenses so my question is: can we use CKEditor in our app or not?
If we use it, we will simply use it to put bold, italic, and a couple of other CKEditor buttons on a textarea for text formatting. We won't be hacking or changing the code in any way.
Can somebody give us a clear answer on this question? Thanks a lot in advance!
jorre
Re: Licensing question (not clear in documentation)
You are the ones that know what license you are using in your product and what kind of software you can add. Expecting someone else to give you an answer on that is .... naive?
Re: Licensing question (not clear in documentation)
If there's any doubt about adding software, we'll just look for an alternative that's 100% free to use in the application. We were just hoping that anyone could give us a clear answer to this because CKEditor seems nice.
Licencing should be more straighforward in my opinion.
Like: get a license if you want to use it for commercial purposes and not "For many companies and products, Open Source licenses are not an option."
Can anybody else clear this up?
Re: Licensing question (not clear in documentation)
Re: Licensing question (not clear in documentation)
maybe I should rephrase: what's the difference between CKEDITOR in the MIT license and the license it ships under now?
Re: Licensing question (not clear in documentation)
Re: Licensing question (not clear in documentation)
I'd say http://ckeditor.com/license makes it pretty clear that you can use it. Look in the "Open Source Licenses" section.
I'm not a lawyer but as far as I know the LGPL ( and I think MIT too ) should give you the right to use it in any commercial application without having an obligation to release your application under the same license.
The LGPL and MIT licenses are similar to the BSD license which can be used commercially and you can distribute your software without having to distribute the source code. Example real life use: Mac OSX kernel and other components are partially based on BSD software and are only distributed commercially in binary form.
There are some conditions about mentioning that your your software uses ckeditor but other then that you're fine.
Since you mentioned it's a web application you're even more likely to be ok about using it since a web application doesn't really mean you're distributing your software ( not under GPL, LGPL or MIT anyway ) so again no obligation to release your source code.
What's weird is that with all this freedom I wonder why would anyone want to buy one of those commercial licenses , except if they want to support the developers which is actually a very good reason.