Using Mautic as a base of niche SaaS product

General Discussion
1

Hi,

First of all, I checked the previous posts but didn’t get enough answers. I am building a niche marketing product and I want to use Mautic for the automation and ESP side of the product. Can I offer Mautic’s services integrated into my product? If yes, what are the legal constraints? I didn’t understand much from the license doc.

  1. Can I freely use, and build my own features on top of Mautic?
  2. Can I keep it closed source, because my product is not open-source.
  3. Do I need to pay any royalties?
  4. Do I have to state this part is Mautic? ( I have no problem with it, I need to understand what are the limitations.)

Thanks for the answers.

2

Hi @imlad115 … welcome :wink:

Mautic is distributed with GPL license. You can read a lot of answers here: Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
Read about “copyleft” here: Copyleft - Wikipedia
To my understanding it really depends on how you develop “on top” and integrate with Mautic.

Regarding 3 and 4… you get a quick start with Mautic. Its a karma question: Do you need to contribute to mautic in any way and mention it? Probably not. But maybe you should?

Contribution can be with time (helping to further develop / test versions) or $ to contribute to the effort. It will help the community and thus your business case as well :wink:

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3

Hello Imlad,

You need to consult with an attorney/lawyer specializing in Open Source Licenses.
Anyhow, on top of the good advice provided by Dirk, here’s my personal opinion:

  • Can I freely use, and build my own features on top of Mautic?
    Yes, as long as you keep your code separated from Mautic’s code yo should be alright.

  • Can I keep it closed source, because my product is not open-source.
    Yes you can keep it closed source (Tho I would recommend you to research why Opening your source code can be a blessing)

The important thing here is you cannot mix GPL code with any non compatible license, and there is no closed source (proprietary) license compatible with GPL, hence that is the reason you should NOT mix your code with Mautic’s.

Nowadays, using the Mautic API you should be able to do everything you need withiout touching the Mautic code or mixing it with your own. But if you ever did, you can create some open source code to solve a particular problem, use it as glue or as a bridge and keep it compliant.

If you need help with that, don’t hesitate to contact me…

BTW, in this video I talk bit about Mautic, Saas and licensing, hope you find it useful:

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