First of all I would like to apologize if the question is posted at the wrong part of the forum, I have searched through the forums but couldn’t find any similar
thread, and submitted the same question through www.jivesoftware.com support contact form but no reply, so here it goes.
I would like to comment that Spark is a wonderful messenger. We’ve been using it in our company internally since version 2.0.7 until now and it’s used as the main communication methods for the staffs in the company. We also have modified the code quite a lot and changed the flow to suite our company requirement and policy.
However due to recent improvement in our business strategy, to provide better support to our clients, we are planning to give away these modified version to our clients (for free) to enable them to connects to our servers so that they can contact our support team in company anytime (24x7). It might worth to mention that we also use Openfire as the messenger server.
The problem is that Spark is based on LGPL License which in my understanding, means that the source code need to published along with the binary of the modified version. And because the modified code includes some business logic that we don’t want to expose, thus prevents us from publishing the source code. As of now we already stripped off the commercially licensed library to prevent any legal issues in future, but Spark’s own license issue is still unresolved yet.
My question would be could it be possible to have the Spark source code without the LGPL license? I have browsed into http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/spark/index.jsp and it says that Spark have both Open Source LGPL or Commercial license, but couldn’t find any more information on the commercial license for Spark (how, where, and to whom the question should be addressed to). FYI the modified version entirely uses Spark version 2.0.7 as the code base for developing. Any advice and information is very much appreciated.
Thank you and best regards,
Eric