Distribute Spark as a branded product

Spark Spark Support
1

I would like to know if we could use Spark and modify it to match my companies needs. We would like to launch it as one of our branded products that offers a chat service as well as a social network platform. Are there any legal implications we need to address to be able to use Spark? I have contacted Jive but they say the don’t support this software anymore. Are we legally obligated to release the source code that we have changed?

To summarize, we want to use Spark as a base to develop our own instant messenger client for our targeted audience.

I am not trying to be an ass here, nor steal the software, I just want to make sure that we don’t get into trouble here if we wanted to use Spark.

We would be willing to provide an image that says “Powered by Spark”, with a web address link back to the Spark home page. I am more than willing to contribute plugins and bug fixes to the community.

Looking forward to your reply.

2

I believe under the licensing of these products you are obligated to provid ethe source of the code you have modified. I could be wrong though.

3

Craig,

This should be just fine – Spark is licensed under LGPL which is relatively commercial-software friendly. If you change certain parts of the existing source, you’ll need to make that available. But you don’t need to make the entire product open source and you definitely have the right to charge money for it.

Regards,

Matt

4

Thanks so much for the reply and the clarification on the subject, much appreciated.

I am looking forward to adding my contributions to the codebase. Spark is an absolutely wonderful product and I enjoy working with it. Our business runs on Openfire and mobile XMPP clients, so adding Spark as the Desktop Client into the mix is definitely going to be exciting.

Thank-you for making such a great product available.