Hi, I have a general question for the community. Let’s say we build a custom app on frappe (which is in no way related to erpnext), is it legal to monetize them? I understand the concept of giving back to the community but in this case my app is very locale specific, it is a LMS designed specifically for civil services teaching centre’s in my country. In short is it legal to monetize a frappe app provided that none of frappe’s legal terms and conditions are violated? (i.e using the frappe logo, name, trademark for personal business purposes)
IANAL, but I don’t see why not? Licenses here…
But if it were me, I wouldn’t bite the hand that feeds – if you make money from it, try to find some ways to contribute to Frappe. Either by coordinating with Frappe and contributing some of your developer(s) free time to helping with core issues (which also helps you):
Or just… you know… give them money.
I am also definitely not a lawyer, but as I understand it…
You can write an app and you can sell it. There’s no ambiguity there.
But, depending on whether the law where you do business sees your work as derivative of ERPNext, you may be obligated to license your app under the GPL. If that were the case, you customers would also be entitled to sell your app (or post the source on github for free).
In other words, the GPL gives you the right to sell the software you write, but it also gives your customers the right to sell or give away the software you wrote too.
Makes sense but my instance is completely different from erpnext as a whole. I am basing my app on an open source framework which could be copyrighted etc, as most copyrighted web apps are based on popular open source framewords. In this case my app is not related to erpnext in any way whatsoever and only pertains to frappe and its legal usage.
We’re talking about two different licenses here: MIT for Frappe and GPLv3 for ERPNext. Both licenses are “open source”, but they work very differently.
MIT is much more permissive. Both allow you to sell software, but any software derived from GPL must also be GPL. If your code does not link to or depend on ERPNext, you have a lot more flexibility.
2 Likes
Ahh yes that clarifies some stuff. Thanks