Geeklog Forums

The company I work for is a large company. It is a million dollor company and I feel it is abusing geeklog, it is usin it as a content managment tool, it has removed all reference to geeklog and and rebranded it, it is using it in the company as a content managment system, i am a massive fan of opensource and believe that this should not be happening, if anyone could advise me on how to best to approach my company, and also what are the terms of your licience.
Regards

Dave

Thanks for your concern. From what you describe, though, it doesn't really sound like a problem.

When you read the GPL, you'll notice that a lot of it deals with distribution. As long as they're not distributing it to clients and they're only using it in-house, they should be fine. And even distributing it would be okay, as long as they're shipping the source code with it (which happens automatically, given that Geeklog is written in PHP).

The rebranding is probably okay, too, as long as they don't claim to have developed it themselves. In fact, we know that quite a few companies think the name sounds "unprofessional" - this may have been such a case.

One of the key concepts of open source is to give the user of a piece of software the ability to modify it for their own use by shipping the source code (in case the original producer went under or is unwilling to make the changes the user wants). Sounds like this is exactly what they're doing.

The copyright is still with the original authors, of course, so you can't just claim to have written a piece of open source software written by somebody else (or change the license). But that would be a simple copyright violation and doesn't really have a lot to do with the GPL or open source.

bye, Dirk

ok sounds good, so you dont have to keep the geeklog.net html on the front of your content managment system or accredit them?. They have removed that bit?

Nope. We've stated repeatedly that while we think it would be nice to leave that link there, we don't really mind when you remove it.

bye, Dirk

thanks dirk, you have put my mind at rest, it is still hard to swallow that you would do all this work and not get accredication for it, of what is a multimillion dollor company, i thought they could atleast buy or donate or something. thanks for your tiem

Well, you could always point someone at your company to this

bye, Dirk