Are portable open-source apps legal?

cybpsych · Post by **cybpsych** » Mon Jul 06, 2009 2:16 am

i'm curious about this ....

open-source apps, e.g. Chrome, Firefox, etc. are free.

as a user, can i repackage and distribute them into thinstall/PAF-format?

is there any legal issues doing this?

reference: http://portableapps.com/

thanks!

beats · Post by **beats** » Mon Jul 06, 2009 4:09 am

No, it's perfectly legal:
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/licensing.html
http://code.google.com/chromium/terms.html

cybpsych · Post by **cybpsych** » Mon Jul 06, 2009 4:16 am

that's good to know! thanks!

newsposter · Post by **newsposter** » Mon Jul 06, 2009 3:04 pm

The people over at portable apps.com have hashed out the issues and what you have to do to stay within gpl as well as the rights of the original programmers.

The biggest no-no is to hawk the repackaged apps as your own original work instead of a 'simple' repackageing of someone elses work.

bober101 · Post by **bober101** » Wed Jul 08, 2009 9:03 am

usualy free apps are provided as-is and the GPL liscence asks you to distribute the source untouched.some times this can even extend to the package it self.

code65536 · Post by **code65536** » Wed Jul 08, 2009 6:15 pm

Each individual app can have its own license with varying levels of restrictiveness. For example, MIT and BSD licenses are generally a lot less restrictive than copyleft licenses like GPL. You should review each one, instead of assuming that it's all GPL (one common mistake is for people to equate GPL to open source because of the publicity that GPL gets).

For example, Chromium uses a BSD license, which just requires that you include the original copyright notice and not use Google's name in promoting your package. Which brings us to the biggest concern: for stuff like Chrome (which is the branded/trademarked version of Chromium) and Firefox (which is the branded/trademarked version of Minefield/Shiretoko), the main thing to watch out for is the use of the trademark, which are separate from the software license.

For the most part, as long as you don't do anything obviously wrong, it's pretty easy to stay within the bounds of open source licenses.