Today I got an email from the Dotster domain registrar, where I have a few old domains, advertising a new site-builder. In the interest of keeping up with the state of the industry, I click through to check out their "content management" offering:
"In addition to giving you the ability to edit your website and control interactive features like a blog or external content from an RSS feed, a Content Management System can act as powerful knowledge management tool."
Sounds good. Well imagine my surprise when I get to the screenshots and discover it's Drupal:
"Add Pages. Create and Administer Content."
"Add Users. Assign Access."
This is without a doubt Drupal 5 running Garland, and this would be pretty cool (Dotster has serious reach), except that the product is being advertised as Dotster Design Studio(SM). SM stands for Service Mark, basically it is equivalent to TM (trademark), for a non-product.
Now, I'm a well-know outlaw and ignore copyright on a regular basis -- and I have no doubt Dotster got this cleared by a whole fleet of lawyers -- but this strikes me as shady at best. Unethical and uncool even if it is technically legal. Seems like par for the course from these guys.
It would be well and fine (in fact, quite good!) for Dotster to offer Drupal as their "blessed" CMS, but they should be honest about it rather than biting off (forking?) the project and slapping their own brand on it. Boo Dotster!
Maybe we can all use the request a free quote link to let them know we're not happy about this? Their regular contact page is here. Oh, and transfer away any domains you may have with them. I know I will be.
Any changes they make to the code must be made available to anyone.
That's not true. They are simply prohibited from providing compiled code without sources. They're free to innovate secretly for a hosted service to their heart's content.
> providing compiled code without sources
Which is irrelevant for PHP applications anyway, of course...
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Meh. I also find it annoying that they steal (not in the legal, but the moral sense) the credit for this. But I also think that they'll come around fairly quickly - this does seem to get them a lot of bad publicity, and they have to decide eventually if disguising the Drupal CMS as their own is worth the cost in credibility.
Thanks for clearing that up.
There are many developers that use a CMS and never talk about the actual platform they use. Most site owners don't know they use Apache either. Nothing new there. Many clients wouldn't recognize the name nor care as long as it fit their needs. Developers establish themselves as a brand. Dotster is doing the same.
Sooner or later the site owners will want something new added and will find that it's Drupal. Hopefully at that point there will be plenty of new sites and new Drupalers. I for one an glad Dotster has blessed Drupal as the CMS of choice.
It's good for purposes of reach, but I still find it irksome that they would re-brand Drupal, strongly implying that it is their own creation. It seems dishonest to me.
I can see both sides. If you try to explain to people what open-source is, they would shy away from it. If you put it behind a familiar name, they embrace it. I am hoping this is what Dotster intends. Either way, in 30 days there will be plenty of hits on any search combination of Dotster - Drupal - CMS.
It would be nice if they admitted to using Drupal, but it depends on how heavily they have customised the Drupal code.
A few years ago Apache was having problems with companies (such as Oracle and IBM) who were shipping customised versions of the Apache Web server under the Apache name.
A lot of problems were reported to Apache, which turned out to be in the vendor customisations, rather than the Apache code base. This wasted a lot of support time.
Now these customised versions have been renamed, but the documentation I have seen clearly state they are based on Apache, and the distributions contain all the license files. The site users would not know whose server was running the Website.
The way Dotster have done things mean that they should be supporting all problems with Dotster Design Studio(SM), not the Drupal Community.
Have Dotster put a lot of effort back into the Drupal community?
I think that this isn't violation of GPL license, although I don't like behaviour like this.
It is more likely that this is an issue about copyright or trademark.
As it stands, Dotster's use of Drupal as a CMS is good for Drupal. Even if they don't give credit.
They have done nothing illegal, unexpected and nothing that Drupal has not freely allowed them to do. Thanks for using Drupal Dotster. I love that I don't have to mention Drupal on my sites, even tho I do.
The issue here for the Drupal community is we feel snubbed. A donation to Drupal, even a small one, from Dotster would make me feel a whole lot better about this.
Oh, and while we're calling Dotster out: http://digg.com/security/Dotster_hijacks_clients_subdomains_as_advertisi...
Dotster may argue that they are doing the drupal community a favor by not mentioning drupal, and therefore forcing users to seek support from dotster.
I think it's great they are using drupal in this way. I think it'd be nice if they credited the drupal community for the software powering their service. However I would be concerned about a massive influx of non-technical newbies to the drupal community. I don't think the drupal community is usually a good starting point for non-technical people, and I recommend them to a drupal company or to a service like Bryght (and now Dotster) if they've got no/low budget.
A large influx of newbies could be problem; I believe that that drupal's biggest advantage is that it primarily tries to meet developer-needs, and then follows that up with meeting drupal user-needs. Therefore the community is filled mostly with drupal developer solutions, and not so many drupal user solutions. Filling the drupal community with non-technical users (that can't or won't become developers) I believe will only contribute to the demise of the drupal developer community.
In Australia (not sure about elsewhere), you can't lease or get finance for a service, only a product.
Some of my smaller clients appreciate that I've "wrapped" 80% of the work needed to get them online into a package I call "Matt's Drupal Pack".
This gives my clients more options for payment.
Finance companies insist that I install a "kill switch" in the software, so the website can be "repossessed".
To achieve this, I make it a condition of purchase that the software can only be used on my hosting provider, and I retain certain Drupal administration rights. They don't have access to the settings.php or the MySQL database.
My clients are happy, the finance company is happy, and I get paid (implied happiness). Drupal gains another happy user, no fraud is committed, and the GPL is honoured.
Almost all my clients choose to install their own copies of Drupal at the end of the lease agreement, and retain my services to customize modules and themes. They are all very grateful for the time and effort I put into educating them about open source software.
I shared this information only to point out a positive example of Drupal being used in a product and perhaps provide inspiration for others with the necessary skills.
Hey, very interesting post.
My written English is not so good so I write in German:
"Lieber den Spatz in der Hand, als die Taube auf dem Dach."
Yours sincerely
Köln
Do you have any links
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I'm not a lawyer, I have not read the GPL in detail from top to bottom (yet), nor do I believe to understand software liscensing well. I can't even spell the word for goodness sake!
However my understanding of the GPL is that they have every right to sell drupal as a service or product. The only difference between what they're doing and what http://goingon.com/ and http://bryght.com/ are doing, is that they have a powered by drupal link back to drupal.org at the bottom of every page. However they do this out of courtesy (and pride?), not obligation. At least not by my (incorrect?) understanding of the GPL.
My understanding is that according to the GPL, Dotster can not remove copyrights IN THE SOURCE CODE, but can rebrand the front end as much as they like.
Any changes they make to the code must be made available to anyone. So therefore the drupal community can only benefit from dotster's code contributions.
Sure it'd be nice of them to link back to drupal. But I don't believe they have any obligation. And obviously it's not in their commercial interests.