Mautic Copyright

General Discussion
1

Greetings @buckhornmktg! Great to see you using Mautic to grow your business. Just wanted to extend a word of caution regarding your efforts. The last bullet in your recent post states the intent to: “Remove Mautic Copyright (I would need to double check the license to see if this is possible)”. Wanted to share with you that Mautic is licensed under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, which means you are free to take the code, modify it and sell it as your own product. However, to do this you must comply with the following:


  1. If you plan on distributing the application, you must include the Mautic source code and the source code of any modifications you make.
  2. You are not permitted to change/remove the copyright or license. Also, any modifications you make must also by licensed by the GPL (meaning free to others).
  3. You must make it clear that your software is a modified version of Mautic so that any errors you create aren’t attributed to Mautic or it’s developers.



    We would encourage you to join the Mautic community and provide Mautic “services” (i.e. development, consulting, hosting, support, etc) adding value back to the community while continuing to grow your business. Thank you for using Mautic!
2

Thanks Jseevers! Take care.

3

Hi Jseevers,

Thanks for this information.

  1. I do plan to fork, but I have no plans to distribute. My forked version of Mautic will be a SAAS B2B2C offering for other agencies and the source code will not be available to customers.

  2. Sorry, I didn’t mean remove the copyright in the source code. I meant removing the footer message that Mautic places at the bottom of the screen (HTML output). That can be removed w/o violating the terms of the GPL. If this wasn’t the case, then most of the websites we view would have copyright notices for bootstrap, jquery and every other technology used to power it at the bottom of the page. If you believe otherwise, please point me to the clause in the license agreement which disallows this and I’ll leave the footer message. Thanks.

  3. Maybe I’m missing something here, but I see no legal bearing to this request. Can you show me where a GPL license requires this? The only way I see this applying is to a publicly distributed version of Mautic, and then I’m required to rename product so I’m not infringing on your marks or name (which probably addresses your concern).

1 Like
4

We appreciate the prompt reply and thoughtful responses.

  1. Thanks for the clarification.
  2. Agreed this is a gray area and a nuance, but we’re willing to let it pass as source code only.
  3. And you are correct. Thank you for clarifying your intent, as it didn’t seem explicitly stated in your post.

Best of luck.

5

Greetings @buckhornmktg! Great to see you using Mautic to grow your business. Just wanted to extend a word of caution regarding your efforts. The last bullet in your recent post states the intent to: “Remove Mautic Copyright (I would need to double check the license to see if this is possible)”. Wanted to share with you that Mautic is licensed under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, which means you are free to take the code, modify it and sell it as your own product. However, to do this you must comply with the following:

  1. If you plan on distributing the application, you must include the Mautic source code and the source code of any modifications you make.
  2. You are not permitted to change/remove the copyright or license. Also, any modifications you make must also by licensed by the GPL (meaning free to others).
  3. You must make it clear that your software is a modified version of Mautic so that any errors you create aren’t attributed to Mautic or it’s developers.

We would encourage you to join the Mautic community and provide Mautic “services” (i.e. development, consulting, hosting, support, etc) adding value back to the community while continuing to grow your business. Thank you for using Mautic!