License question

[Lordhp]

Hello,
I'm not good lawyer, so that I don't understand the whole licensing thing.

We are programming closed-source commercional CMS, and we would like to include WYM editor within it with our modifications.

Since WYM editor is dual licensed under GPL and MIT license, I just don't understand what that means.

If the project is under GPL, all modifications have to be given back to the community. That is okay, but if the project includes the GPL project, even derived project have to be released under GPL.

MIT seems to be something like do-wathever-you-want license, thus we can include WYM editor in our binaries, don't have to report all modifications back..

Now, for the questions:

1. What actually means dual-licensing? Customer can choose, or we have to obey both of the licenses?
2. Do we have to write into the CMS that we are using WYM editor actually? Can we write there that it is modified?
3. Do we have to report ALL modifications back to the community? We will, of course since we support open-source projects, however, not all modifications can be reported because they will be useless and some of them will lead to possible stealing of our know-how and thus our project will not be guarded against this.
4. If the project is GPL, and we hardcode it into our CMS, do we have to release CMS Source?

I believe that someone of you know the answers...

Thanks for your time and work.

Best Regards,
Pavel Ptacek, Czech Republic

[jfh]

Hi Pavel,

Thanks for the answer
Dual-licensing means that you can choose the license which is the most convenient for your project.
Thus, if you want to integrate WYMeditor (even modified) in your commercial project, and don't want to release the source code, you've to comply to the M.I.T. license.
The condition is: you must include the copyright notice (MIT-license.txt) in all copies (or substantial portions) of WYMeditor, which is provided without warranty of any kind.

If you don't give copies of the software to your customers (so you host it on your webserver), a good idea is to put a link to WYMeditor's homepage somewhere in your CMS, or a notice stating that you use WYMeditor (+ link or copyright info).

Choosing the M.I.T. is also compatible with releasing (giving back to the Community) a part of the modifications/improvements you make.

You can also help the project by:

giving feedback
beta testing
suggesting ideas
submitting tickets on the Trac
submitting patches
making a donation on SourceForge
talking about WYMeditor on your website, with your colleagues, ...
writing documentation
making translations
creating themes (skins) for next versions
integrating WYMeditor in an open source CMS
working on plugins
working on WYMeditor core code (we need help!)
... and so on

HTH,

[Lordhp]

Thanks for your answer. Now, we have no problem in integrating WYM in our CMS..

Now, we are still in pre-alpha stage, so that when our project move to alpha testing, we will start implementing WYM.

Implementation means that we will, of course, modify the editor source, and we will be working on that so on (incl. translation). Currently there is no time to work on WYM, I'm sorry.

However, I will keep in touch with forum and with WYM itself and when the time will come, some SVN access would be nice (it's still question of one or two months at most).

I will contact you, when time will come.

Keep up good work, we are going to help, just hold on!

Have a nice day,
Pavel

[jfh]

OK, thanks
Please don't hesitate to contact me when you want.

Cheers,