MIT License For Proprietary App

Question

There are many questions posted with great answers, but nothing I found met my requirements. Hope you guys can help.

I will be building a niche social site platform based on Ruby on Rails and will integrate trusted popular gems to save time. The final product will be launched where users can sign-in to use the basic services for free, and pay to have access to extra add-ons and features.

Since I won't be selling the app itself, do I still need to have the code available to the public. Since Ruby on Rails is MIT licensed, I'm thinking of sticking with gems that are licensed as MIT also.

Without trying to complicate matters worse; what happens let's say it becomes a success and a VC firm or some investors get interested to purchase domain and all? Will the transfer run into any major legal bottlenecks?

Appreciate your feedback.

Answer 1

You do not have to publish your code, this is a major flaw of the GPL v2 that they tried to fix in v3 but the huge public outcry stopped them.

If you want to be nice though, if/when you make changes to the gem code to improve your site, fork the gem on Github and check it in - that way, other people can benefit from your work without you having to share your core site code.