[hobbit] license question

[Henrik Størner]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 04:34:34PM +0100, Jan Vojtko wrote:
> Hi,
> we would like to use hobbit as the part of our monitoring system delivered 
> to our customers.

You should read the COPYING file that comes with Hobbit, that is
the official license text for Hobbit.

> Can we do it?

That means you will be "distributing" Hobbit in the legal sense of the
word, and therefore all of the terms of the GPLv2 license come into play.
What this means is essentially that if you make any modifications to
the Hobbit source code, then you must make these modifications available
to everyone - e.g. by posting the source code to your modified Hobbit
on a website. That includes any bugfixes, enhancements, custom
add-ons and modifications etc. Anything except changes to the
configuration files.

You are also obliged to provide your customers with the source code
to Hobbit if they ask for it, for a period of at least 3 years. 
And your customer is entitled to re-distribute Hobbit to others 
(if they want to do so, rather than just download it directly from 
Sourceforge).

Apart from that, you can pretty much do as you please. I would
appreciate it if you would consider contributing something to
the Hobbit developers (i.e. me) via the Paypal link on
www.xymon.com, but there is no legal obligation for you to do that.


Regards,
Henrik