[Owncloud] License

[Frank Karlitschek]

On 19.12.2013, at 19:19, Tim Atkins <ttim.atkinss at gmail.com> wrote:

> This answer confuses me more ;-)

Sorry for the confusion. Licenses are sometimes tricky.


> And what about a PHP software (out of the box) that use the owncloud's REST APIs ?  
> 
> You tell about mobile apps, desktop apps interacting with ownCloud via REST APIs ... you can have a webpage/software in other server, interacting via REST API's with a ownCloud installation in other server.  
> 
> Does that PHP source code (and the HTML views generated for User Experience) need to have the AGPL license ?
> 
> I'm not trying to not credit ownCloud (it has to!), but avoiding to need to give AGPL license to our main software, that would use ownCloud cloud features for files, but nothing else more.
> 

Sorry I wasn't clear here. The licenses don't care about development languages or other technologies. The question is if it runs in the same process or not. If it runs in the same process then you extend/change ownCloud in the FSF definition. In this case you have to choose a compatible license. If your software is running in a different process and you only communicate with ownCloud via the REST/WebDAV APIs then your software is clearly independent from ownCloud. So you can choose any license you want.

So you can choose any license you want in your scenario where you build an independent application using PHP that communicates with ownCloud via the REST/WebDAV.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Frank


> Thank you Frank
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 12:32 PM, Frank Karlitschek <frank at owncloud.org> wrote:
> 
> On 19.12.2013, at 00:03, Tim Atkins <ttim.atkinss at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hi:
> >
> > I've been reading other similar questions in the forums, but some of them refer to this mailing list to be safe.
> >
> > We are planing to include owncloud as part of a bigger software, since the cloud features are solid and good enough (good job! by the way).
> >
> > We do understand the AGPL license, but we want to be sure.
> >
> > If we code new owncloud applications and we don't change the core, that new programming, as it's addon to the core, would apply AGPL also ? Would we need to apply AGPL to those addons applications we would do ?
> 
> It depends what addons you mean here.
> Applications who are running "out of process" can have any license you choose. Examples are mobile apps, desktop apps, server applications that interact with ownCloud via WebDAV der the REST APIs and so on. AGPL doesn't restrict anything here.
> 
> Addons that are running in the same process as ownCloud has to have the same license or a compatible license as ownCloud. This is the case for PHP code that is used to extend ownCloud like the ownCloud apps. Compatible licenses are AGPL itself and every other license that has less restrictions for the users like Apache or MIT.
> 
> 
> Frank
> 
> 
> 
> >
> > Thank you in advance !
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