q&a is open source, so all developed sites have to grant their source code?

Question

Hi all, since q&a is open source licensed I think all "derivates" are open source as well?

I would like to get the source code of http://luvitt.com/ as there are a lot of features I would like to implement as well.

Does the developer has to give me a copy of his source code?

I am a newbee when it comes to licensing / Open source, thanks.....

Answer 1

Hey, I'm the owner of the site.

Thanks, glad you're liking the site or the mods.

I'm planning on open-sourcing the theme and some plugins as I find the time. I'm writing my thesis currently and have no time in cleaning up the code.  My thesis will be done by autumn, hopefully.

Right now, most modifications are quickly hacked together, bugs galore, messing up the core and whatnot so it would be rather careless to let others tamper with it.

I think a great contribution would be the q2a Bootstrap theme. This is on my todo list. I actually told this GidGreen a while back (a year or so ago) but my studies and side projects kept me too busy.

Comments

@Klick Klack Klub: Nice experiment you developed!

I am interested in the "live events" appearing on your site. Is that an existing plugin? If not, could you give our community a copy of this mod?

Probably you are getting all the events from qa_eventlog, but it would be nice to see the ajax/php implementation behind. Thanks.

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The live events feature is a simple, seperate node.js socket.io application. The live events are broadcasted through socket.io and triggered by a qa-events plugin that calls into the socket.io app via dnode-php.

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thanks for letting us know. Would be great to have this on php + ajax!

I open a plugin request on that.

Answer 2

No. A website developed using open source software does not have to publish its modifications. And especially not any "additional" code such as plugins. You would have to contact the site owner and see if they are willing to give or sell you their modifications.

Obtaining source code only comes into play if someone distributes their modifications. So for example, if I modified the Q2A core I am perfectly entitled to sell my modifications to you, but the code must still be open source so you can do whatever you want with it after that, either selling it or giving it away for free.

However, developing a plugin for Q2A would not count as modification as it's separate code, so I could sell any of my plugins under any license I want.

This stuff can get quite complicated really...