Copyright and sources

The entire co-ment source code is copyright © Sopinspace 2006-2008.

User generated content

For legal issues regarding texts and comments, refer to the terms of use and terms of service.

Credits and acknowledgements

The icons used in the www.co-ment.net home page are derived from icons included the Tango theme for KDE designed by the Tango desktop project (http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Desktop_Project). They are licenses under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/)
The co-ment commenting interface has derived much inspiration from the STET commenting system put in place for the revision of the GNU General Public License. However, co-ment does not use code from this system.

We also would like to thank:

• Kirill Miazine for the norwegian translation of the interface

Free software

The source code for the full functionality of the co-ment service (with the exclusion of software used for the financial transaction associated to subscribing to the www.co-ment.net pro service) is distributed as free software under the GNU Affero GPL version 3 (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html). It can be downloaded at: http://www.sopinspace.com/products/co-ment/
Please pay attention to the copyright notices and indications about choice of licenses for libraires in this page. Please note that an additional trademark clause has been added in accordance with article 7 (e) of the AGPLv3.

It is to our knowledge one of the first instances of distribution of the full code base of a large Web 2.0 application service. In order to protect the source code against possible reproprietarization, we need to use a license whose copyleft clause is strong enough for guaranteeing that any operator of a Web service based on modified code has to redistribute the code for the full server and client application under the same license. We are making it sure by distributing the code under the Affero GPLv3 license. It is forbidden to run a Web service or other product or service in the classes and geographical regions covered by the co-ment trademark without the trademark owner's authorization. The future distribution of the source code will contain a trademark clause forbidding the licensee to use the co-ment trademark unless specifically authorized by its owner.

Why do we charge for the pro service while co-ment is free software?

co-ment is free software because we believe that such a fundamental tool for human collective endeavours should never be proprietary. To operate a service such as co-ment with a reasonable quality of service and support and to continue develop its functionality, we must charge for it. co-ment's quality of service includes the following: NO ADVERTISING, NO USER PROFILING, NO PRIVACY INTRUSION. If the number of users of the co-ment pro service raises significantly, we will share the benefits of the economies of scale with users. We also made sure that people who can not pay for the pro service have access to a quantitatively limited but fully operational service. We call you to support our business model.

Technology

co-ment is based on the django web framework and powered by the python programming language.