I searched the blog for similar question but did not find something. So I hope my question is not already answered somewhere.
I am in the process of writing an App for a sports club. Part of it should be to show the blog from the club’s web site. It is important, that the content is available offline. When I came across the source code of the WP for Android App, I thought it would be good to have two Fragments, i.e. the ViewPosts and the ViewPostFragment to show up in my App, but both to be used in read only mode.
It would therfore be pretty nice if I would be able to call those two fragments from the outside and also use the DB functionality of the App to save the data locally. To get access to my blog I would like to pass a URL and the needed credentials as parameter. Technically these type of changes should be possible, my issue is more of a legal type.
If I got it correct, the WP for Android App is licensed under GPL. This does mean that I am not allowed to embed part of the code into my App without open-sourcing my App, as the two fragments would be a integral part of my app. Therefore it would be interesting to modify the original WP for Android App, give back my changes to the community, make WP for Android App an optional part of my App and call WP for Android App during run-time when I show my blog.
Would that be legally safe? Did you ever got similar requests o is somebody already working on something similar?
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Dan 4:07 pm on October 12, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I don’t think we’ve come across a scenario like this before.
If you use code from the Android app, under the GPL you should also offer your app’s source somewhere under the GPL as well. Is that something you don’t really want to do though?
If you just want to show posts from the club’s site in the app, you could do that fairly easily with the WP XML-RPC api.
21wst 5:56 am on October 15, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I am already showing the posts in a WebView widget which renders the mobile WP site, so showing the content is not the issue. I was just curious whether using the WP App as “ContentProvider” would be an issue.
And yes, I do not like to provide the App’s source under GPL. I could think about licensing it under an Apache 2 license as I support open sourcing in general, but GPL to my opinion is too restrictive.
Isaac Keyet 2:19 pm on October 27, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
If you base your work off of the GPL you can’t change the license.