Liferay Copyright !!

[Vipin Menon, modificado hace 16 años.]

Hi,

I have a question :

I downloaded latest version of Liferay and planning to use the product in AS - IS form ( All the content will be mine but look and feel used will be same as it comes with the default download). Am I violating Copyright here ? Can I use the Liferay Portal in AS - IS way as it looks in ( www.Liferay.com ) ? Here I am not talking about the contents, logo etc but only Look and feel and use of different functionality like Forum etc.

Thanks and Regards,
Vipin Menon

[Brian Chan, modificado hace 16 años.]

We try to be as open as possible. This means even our public theme is made available as a MIT license.

MIT is like Apache and BSD. They are non viral licenses unlike LGPL or GPL.

For example, in GPL, if you link to it, then your code also needs to be GPL.

In LGPL, you can link to it, but if you modify the LGPL code, then your code needs to be LGPL as well (so it's less viral). Liferay utlizes a lot of LGPL libraries, but because we dont' modify them, our code can still be MIT.

With MIT, like Apache, you can do whatever you want with the code as long as the original license remains on the top of the source code.

The only catch here is that our name, "Liferay", is trademarked. This means you can't go around telling ppl you "are" Liferay.

We're more than happy to have you use our code. I hope you get lots of value out of it and can benefit others as well.

[Brian Chan, modificado hace 16 años.]

Oh, one thing to note though. Not all of our themes and portlets are MIT license. Why not? Because some of them include libraries that are GPL. And some of the themes and portlets you see on the repository weren't written by us and so include the license of the original authors.

With that said though, the themes and portlets that are included in our bundles are MIT.

[Jonathan Hayward, modificado hace 16 años.]

Brian Chan:

MIT is like Apache and BSD. They are non viral licenses unlike LGPL or GPL. [emphasis added]

May I offer an editorial suggestion?

The kind of person who would check about whether there's a copyright violation in downloading and using Liferay "as is" is not necessarily familiar with this use of "viral."

I am quite grateful for the license model you use, but it would have been better to say something like:

Liferay tries to be very free about letting other people use their code. You can use it for free, modify it, and contribute changes without having someone else's license forced onto what you contribute.

(Or maybe there's some more precise way of paraphrasing the MIT license.)

Hope this helps present something about Liferay I'm very impressed with,
Jonathan Hayward
Jonathan's Corner: A Glimpse into Eastern Orthodox Christianity

[Vipin Menon, modificado hace 16 años.]

Thanks for all the info provided here. Concept of 'Viral' is definately new to me but I got what you all wanted to tell. Thanks again !!

Cheers,
Vipin

[Jonathan Hayward, modificado hace 16 años.]

Vipin Menon:

Thanks for all the info provided here. Concept of 'Viral' is definately new to me but I got what you all wanted to tell. Thanks again !!

Wonderful. I'm glad.

Hoping you enjoy using Liferay, too,
Jonathan Hayward
Jonathan's Corner: A Glimpse into Eastern Orthodox Christianity

[Keith Egler, modificado hace 16 años.]

I noticed that liferay tomcat bundle 4.4.0 ships with friki.jar (wiki software), which appears to be GPL licensed. Does this pose any issues with keeping the MIT license intact for the liferay distribution?

[Jorge Ferrer, modificado hace 16 años.]

Hi Keith,

Friki has a dual licence, Apache and GPL, so we choose to use the Apache license.

[Richard Knight, modificado hace 15 años.]

Speaking of copyright issues, the Liferay logo was briefly mentioned, but my question is a little different. Can I embed the liferay logo on my website as a reference to a technology that I use?

Thanks!

[Jorge Ferrer, modificado hace 15 años.]

Hi Richard,

To be fully safe I would recommend emailing pr at liferay.com with the specific use case to get an approval.

[Michael Saechang, modificado hace 15 años.]

moved to Miscellaneous.