Commercial Educational Product Using Jupyter Notebooks

[Brendan Smith]

Hi,

I would like to build a commercial educational product using Jupyter Notebooks. Is this possible?

I have read Jupyter's governance, but am struggling to fully disentangle the legal jargon.

Thank you for your time,

Best,

Brendan Smith

[Matthew Seal]

Hi Brendan,

It's definitely possible to build products on top of Jupyter Notebooks. There's many companies doing this already in a number of domains and offerings. The governance is more about managing the open source code and engagements that promote Jupyter. For building a commercial product you usually don't need to worry about the project internal governance.

Most (perhaps all?) software under Jupyter is licensed with 3-clause BSD license which gives open permission to reuse the code without needing to coordinate with Jupyter teams. If you distribute code to people you have to include the license as described in the link. Hosting a webserver doesn't require this license sharing, just if you send someone source code from the open source repositories.

If you contribute code that can be shared we're always happy to take pull requests to get that code into the open source repositories as well so you and others can equally benefit.

Hope that helps,

Matt

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[Brendan Smith]

Hi Matthew,

Thank you for the reply. If I am understanding correctly, if I sell to my customers something that needs to be downloaded, then I need to provide the license. I guess it would come down to whether or not I provide them with the source code in the purchase.

Thanks again

On Wednesday, May 27, 2020 at 2:18:51 PM UTC-4, Matthew Seal wrote:

Hi Brendan,

It's definitely possible to build products on top of Jupyter Notebooks. There's many companies doing this already in a number of domains and offerings. The governance is more about managing the open source code and engagements that promote Jupyter. For building a commercial product you usually don't need to worry about the project internal governance.

Most (perhaps all?) software under Jupyter is licensed with 3-clause BSD license which gives open permission to reuse the code without needing to coordinate with Jupyter teams. If you distribute code to people you have to include the license as described in the link. Hosting a webserver doesn't require this license sharing, just if you send someone source code from the open source repositories.

If you contribute code that can be shared we're always happy to take pull requests to get that code into the open source repositories as well so you and others can equally benefit.

Hope that helps,

Matt

On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 3:11 AM Brendan Smith <mrbsm...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I would like to build a commercial educational product using Jupyter Notebooks. Is this possible?

I have read Jupyter's governance, but am struggling to fully disentangle the legal jargon.

Thank you for your time,

Best,

Brendan Smith

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[William Stein]

On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 11:18 AM Matthew Seal <msea...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Brendan,
> It's definitely possible to build products on top of Jupyter Notebooks. There's many companies doing this already in a number of domains and offerings.

I founded one of those companies (see [1]), and I'm happy to video
chat with you about my experiences. Of course, I am not a lawyer and
do not speak for the Jupyter project, but it's possible my experience
could be helpful. Feel free to contact me.

-- William (wst...@cocalc.com)

[1] https://cocalc.com/doc/jupyter-notebook.html

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jupyter/CAJF6vz41iGL8Z%3DsWwMua77NStf%3DTPDjQkETu65%2BTcth7caAGrw%40mail.gmail.com.



--
William (http://wstein.org)

[Matthias Bussonnier]

Thanks for the question,

I am not a lawyer either and this is my personal interpretation of
the license, but more or less you can do almost whatever you want
with/to the code, you just need to make sure that attribution is
correct. For example this: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-made-this
is not allowed.

Most of the governance and legal mentions are for the "name" Jupyter
and anything associated with the "brand". It roughly tell you that you
are allowed to say your product uses or is based on Jupyter, but you
cannot use a name or logos in a way that could have a user be confused
about whether or not your product is part of, or associated with
Jupyter. You also can't do modifications of the logo without
authorisations. Example "EduJupyter" would probably violate trademark.
If your site is predominantly blue, you are technically not allowed to
make a blue variation of the Jupyter Logo with your color.

As a side note, defending the trademark is mandatory or the Jupyter
Project could lose it, if you ever ask "can I do X", and you get "no",
or we come to you and tell you you can't do Y, it might not be because
we don't like what you did, but because we are legally obliged if we
want to keep the trademark.
--
Matthias

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jupyter/CACLE5GB34DZsmKEZvGtGyiZSoEx%3DF05HAM8uKU%3DeXOco-M41KQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Matthew Seal]

Matthias and William covered the question fairly well. One thing I'd add is that you only need the license included for downloads if the download includes source code from Jupyter (or other) projects. e.g. Downloading a notebook .ipynb file does not require a license, but downloading the code that parses such a file from nbformat would. I also forgot to add the caveat of "I'm not a lawyer" so it's not my domain of expertise but I've worked with these types of licenses for a while now.

Best,

Matt

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jupyter/CANJQusVW2mz0cmiVJx%3D%3DwgsEd6v%2BXrD06swYtbs3JKGGLbMLxQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Brendan Smith]

Hi William,

Thank you for the comment. I took a look at the website you provided and it looks impressive. Thanks for the offer talk about your experience. I think it'd be very valuable to for me to listen and learn from your experience. Can you please let me how we can proceed?

Best,

Brendan Smith

On Thursday, May 28, 2020 at 9:38:50 PM UTC-4, William Stein wrote:

On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 11:18 AM Matthew Seal <msea...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Brendan,
> It's definitely possible to build products on top of Jupyter Notebooks. There's many companies doing this already in a number of domains and offerings.

I founded one of those companies (see [1]), and I'm happy to video
chat with you about my experiences.  Of course, I am not a lawyer and
do not speak for the Jupyter project, but it's possible my experience
could be helpful.  Feel free to contact me.

 -- William (wst...@cocalc.com)

[1] https://cocalc.com/doc/jupyter-notebook.html


>The governance is more about managing the open source code and engagements that promote Jupyter. For building a commercial product you usually don't need to worry about the project internal governance.
>
> Most (perhaps all?) software under Jupyter is licensed with 3-clause BSD license which gives open permission to reuse the code without needing to coordinate with Jupyter teams. If you distribute code to people you have to include the license as described in the link. Hosting a webserver doesn't require this license sharing, just if you send someone source code from the open source repositories.
>
> If you contribute code that can be shared we're always happy to take pull requests to get that code into the open source repositories as well so you and others can equally benefit.
>
> Hope that helps,
> Matt
>
> On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 3:11 AM Brendan Smith <mrbsm...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I would like to build a commercial educational product using Jupyter Notebooks. Is this possible?
>>
>> I have read Jupyter's governance, but am struggling to fully disentangle the legal jargon.
>>
>> Thank you for your time,
>> Best,
>> Brendan Smith
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Project Jupyter" group.

>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to jup...@googlegroups.com.

>> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jupyter/2c4b064f-9c69-42e6-9a51-eca24872ad24%40googlegroups.com.
>
> --
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[Brendan Smith]

Hi Matthias,

Thank you for the explanation. I definitely won't be using the name Jupyter in my product's name. Nor will I use their logo or any recreation of it.

Best,

Brendan Smith

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> William (http://wstein.org)
>
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[Brendan Smith]

Hi Matthew,

Thank you for the additional information. This helps clarify things more. I think the core of the product would involve distribution of bundles of pre-made Jupyter notebooks. The user would then download and use the .ipynb files. In fact, I bet anyone who is savy enough to be able to utilize the code that parses such files would be able to simply make the notebooks that I am selling themselves.

Best,

Brendan Smith

> >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to jup...@googlegroups.com.

> >> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jupyter/2c4b064f-9c69-42e6-9a51-eca24872ad24%40googlegroups.com.
> >
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>
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>
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> William (http://wstein.org)
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[Brendan Smith]

Hi William,

I didn't realize that I can send a private message here. I will just go ahead and do this.