I’ve seen that most of Spark is under LGPL license, but there seems to be also some commercial license. Is it only for the plugins under the commercial folder ?
It’s just that we would like to give to our clients, a customized version of spark to access only our network. What precaution should we take if we want to do so ? I’ve read that we should provide the source code for download as well for all modified code, but what about the commercial license? Which part of your software is actually under the commercial license?
Also, would there is a way to not be under the LGPL license, so we don’t have to provide the source we modified?
Jive Software owns the code, and as such they can decide to release the source under a different (commercial) license. You would need to talk to them if you wanted to do something like that.
The GPL does allow you to make changes without sharing the changes provided you do not distribute the application. I dont know if that fits your description or not.
Otherwise, you are correct, you must provide the source. It can be as simple as having a note that it is available upon written request (and actually provided it when requested), or a simple download on your website somewhere. It dosnt need to be much.
You would need to provide the source especially if your are distributing the product to your customers. I think that is the case. You would be misrepresenting the software as your own when it is in fact not. If you modify the code and distribute it you must reference the source and provide your source.
All Igniterealtime projects are open sourced under the Apache 2 license. You do not need a license to use them. Jive software graciously gave the code to this community several years ago, and thus there are no such restrictions on its usage.
It may be Apache 2 license, but it would be nice if you could contribute back any patches or changes you make to the software to help continue driving this software forward!