Hi guys,

I'm a Silverstripe n00b, and I'm breaking off from my current company to become a freelance developer. I'm massively impressed by Silverstripe and wondering what the licensing options are with the CMS? I know it's open source but I'd rather know where I stood using it before selling my services to clients.

Cheers,
Nick

Hi Squiddon,

Exciting news to hear you are breaking into the freelance world! Good luck, it can be difficult.

Silverstripe's licence is very liberal: http://www.silverstripe.org/bsd-license/

Your not allowed to sell SS (as far as i know) but you sell your service to implement it, etc as well as the modifications and custom code you make.

Basically, the core of SS is open source, but you are not obliged to release any work you do on your custom sites. Meaning your intellectual property is protected.

Digging through the rest of the SilverStripe site will give you the answers you need.

Excellent, thanks for the info Pigeon, I was hoping that would be the answer!

and important to note that most other OS CMS's (including Drupal) are on GNU GPL licence which is quite different from BSD (that SS is on). In particular since you are setting out to do work for others (commercial entities maybe) - you may find that a BSD licence is more appropriate. Worth having a read of this http://zerias.blogspot.com/2008/01/gpl-and-bsd-impact.html - hopefully the key difference from doing commercial work with SS from a corporate standpoint will be clear.

By the way - welcome to the world of "e-lancers" and all the best for your biz

cheers