Software devlopment legal question

Lets say I have a program that has a command prompt utility with a "long winded" syntax that produces results to the screen. Now, if I want to create a GUI version of this utility and post in on my website for others to use, is that legal?

Allow me to explain a bit further. The users downloading the GUI utility would be required to have the actual product. My program allows the user only to type in their query, then it just runs the CLI version in the background with the query information already plugged in... This then passes the output result to the GUI screen.

Obviously the GUI is much easier and faster to use for most people.

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Comments

dynamik

Are you going to sell it?

I see stuff like this pop up now and then, and I've never seen a backlash to it.

You should probably contact the vendor and get a definite answer from them though.

Megadeth4168

dynamik wrote:

Are you going to sell it?

I see stuff like this pop up now and then, and I've never seen a backlash to it.

You should probably contact the vendor and get a definite answer from them though.

I don't plan to sell it, nor will it come with their utility, so the person downloading my GUI needs to already have the CLI version. I'm just trying to find out before I upload my program.

I have actually contacted the company... probably about 6 months ago, never heard back from them.... It's not really a big deal, I just won't upload something until I'm sure it's OK.

darkuser

depends if the source is licenced or "gnu"

dynamik

I really don't think you're going to have a problem. If it does turn into an issue, they're just going to send you a cease and desist letter. Maybe run through their EULA and see if it mentions anything related if you're that worried about it. I don't think you'd be doing anything illegal unless you included their software or did something like reverse engineer their software.

hypnotoad

You're building your own thing, not modifying theirs. Their program will still work independently of your 3rd party add-on. I can't imagine this would cause too much of a stir, or that they would have much legal recourse to prevent you from creating an add-on to their program.

Then again, I'm pretty liberally-minded when it comes to copyright.

Megadeth4168

Hopefully it wont be a problem! I don't plan on releasing this program immediately, but sometime in the near future I will. Thanks for the feedback.

JDMurray

Building an app that uses another program is only a problem if you are distributing the original program without proper permission. If you don't distribute the program that your GUI app uses then there are no worries. It doesn't matter if the program's license is commercial, GPL, MIT, BSD, etc.