Note: There are many questions answers related to the licensing. But I think my requirement is specific, so asking a separate question.
We are considering to fork a GPL 2 project and use it for commercial purposes. This project has not been updated in past 2 years, but it's a great solution for our requirement. Ofcourse we will be enhancing it in future, but for now we would like to use it as it is. We are not direclty selling the product, but we will offer it as a service(with monthly subscription). Can we do this?
What happens to the license and copyright? Since we are not distributing the product, the end users may not get to know these information.
Best Answer
Yes, GPLv2 code can be used in the manner you describe. That in fact is one of the motivations for the AGPL and GPLv3. The modified code must, of course, never be given to anyone outside the organization or the obligation to make the source code available will be incurred.
There will probably be a negative reaction from the open-source community, as this use is considered technically legal but just not cricket (it's viewed at best as profiting from someone else's work without compensating them for it in any form such as by contributing new work back for others to benefit from). Possibilities for avoiding this include contributing the changes back (if they aren't a core part of the business) or contacting the project to see if the copyright holders would license the project's code for internal use in return for financial or other support (even if this project isn't under active development, hardware and other resources may be needed for other projects the copyright holders are working on).
The client side needs to be examined also. If there are any modifications made to the client code, the source code for them will need to be made available since the client will be distributed to customers. If there isn't a client (eg. a web application) or if an unmodified client is used, there won't be a legal issue.