How do you advertise your product if you use open source projects?

Question

For example, say I am building product abc and instead of building my own username password infrastructure, menuing, etc., I use a CMS. Instead of just having the CMS for normal CMS type stuff, I build my product into it for the local Intranet (just an example). when I say I have created product abc do I have to say "Product ABC with CMS xyz"? Or can I have in my list somewhere a line that says it is based on CMS xyz so that I have something like this:

abc features:

• based upon CMS xyz
• php
• apache or iis
• etc.

Also, Can I sell a product like that with so much based upon the cms, even though that's not the main functionality of the product?

Answer 1

It depends on the license of the project you're using. Typo3 for example requires attribution in the generated HTML as a comment. Most licenses I know of that allow commercial use require attribution only in source code if they require it at all. So if the license doesn't say it specifically you don't have to advertise that your product is based upon another. A lot of licenses even forbid this because they don't want derived products to potentially benefit from their name (the PHP license for example disallows use of the PHP name in derived products). IANAL

Answer 2

I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is as long as you give them credit somewhere it is fine, especially if its open source material.

I would check with the publishers of the source though since different people have different requirements for using their source material.