 Everybody, it's Brian. I had a question from a gentleman named Kyle. It was, do you have to buy the cute commercial version to make money? And assuming the answer is no, how can you make money using cute open source? And this is a question I've gotten before. So I'm going to try and wrap Kyle's question and a few others right into one video. So let's talk about licensing. Cute has what's called a dual license model, meaning there's a commercial version and an open source version. And this is the source of a lot of confusion. A lot of people think you need the commercial version to sell your software. And that 100% is not the case. You can actually sell your software using the open source version. You just have to follow the licensing guidelines. So let's take a look at cute's website and see what we can find out. So we're going to go to download try by and we're going to go past by cute and past try cute and go straight to open source. Now footnote. Yes, you can and should view the buying options. They have a small business version. So if commercial is just too expensive, you can get the small business version for much, much cheaper. And there's an educational version, which you can get for free for education. So go to downloads for open source users. And what do we got here? So first things first, you have to understand your obligations and the licensing restrictions. And I am not a licensing expert. I'm not a lawyer. So disclaimer, this video is 100% my opinion and what I'm reading off the screen. When in doubt, consult a lawyer or read the licensing guidelines yourself. So first things first, it comes in the LGPL version three or the GPL version two or the GPL version three. Again, you pretty much have to be a lawyer to understand the differences between those unless you want just real high level details, but they do give you the high level here. So for GPL, all users have the rights to obtain, modify and redistribute the full source code of your application. Your users are granted rights founded on the for freedoms of the GNU public license. Now you can click that link and deep dive into the details. Or you can go down to the LGPL any modification to a cute component covered by the GNU lesser public license must be contributed back to the community. So really what they're saying here is you have to follow these licensing guidelines, which can be daunting at first, especially if you're not into the legal stuff. And you have to make it open source. So don't download the open source version and then make a closed source proprietary application. You're now violating the license. So you have to make yours an open source program. And if you make any modifications to a cute component, meaning you dive into the cute source code and make changes, you have to contribute those changes back to cute. So the whole community can benefit from it. Let's talk about contributions. First off, if you're going to build an open source program, you have to contribute back to the open source community. And if you change any of the cute code, you have to contribute that back to cute. On top of that, you really should contribute back to the cute ecosystem. For example, my YouTube channel is just hundreds. I mean, literally hundreds of free videos on how to use cute. It's all free. I don't charge you a dime. I don't even put advertisements on there. So when you think about open source, you also have to think about the betterment of the community and what you're going to do to contribute. There are some additional requirements with open source, which can get well a little bit scary unless you really read the fine print and understand what you're getting into. We're going to go over their webpage and we're going to look at a real world example. Okay, back at cute's website, we are in the open source section. You scroll down, you're going to see this little thing that says open source usage obligations. This is where people get really, really scared really, really fast. I mean, if all this legal stuff wasn't scary, this really scares the bejeebas out of people. So what we're talking about here is the majority of the modules are under the LG PLV three and the GPL v3 open source. But when you're developing with cute open source, you also have these additional guidelines you have to follow. For example, provide a relinking mechanism for cute libraries. What does that really mean? That means static linking? Can't do that off the table. You're going to get in trouble. So dynamic linking really is not a big deal. Everybody's hung up on static linking because they want a single distributable file. But honestly, that's what installers are made for. And provide a license copy and explicit knowledge of cute use. That just basically means you're going to acknowledge this was built with cute and you actually have to include the words built with cute and provide a well cute license for the user to read and understand. Basically, their way of saying, Hey, this was built with cute, we want people to know cute exists. Make a cute source code copy available for customers, meaning make it open source. Except that cute source code modifications are non proprietary. This is where people get into really, really bad legal trouble. I mean, what they'll do is they'll download cute, make a fork of it, make some changes and then call it their proprietary system, which now that's a violation of license, you can't do that. And make open consumer devices. What that means is if you're going to make some sort of like hardware device, well, guess what, that has to be open source as well. And there's other legalities in there. Again, consult with cute consult a lawyer deep dive into licensing, make sure you understand it. Now, if you're just building software, that really does not apply to you that much. Except digital rights management terms, and then you got to go out and read the fact, which is just reading a bunch of stuff and understanding it and then take special consideration when attempting to enforce software patents, meaning if you're going to patent your software, you have to understand you're also going to have to avoid trying to patent the parts that are cute. All this open source stuff is well terrifying, because there's all these requirements and no one wants to get sued. So what is an open source application built with cute really look like, but we're going to take a look at what's called shot cut. And it's the video editing software that I used to make this very video. If you go out there, it is a free open source cross platform video editor. It runs on Linux Max Windows, you name it, it runs on it. And it's absolutely amazing. So let's just take a look and see what this looks like. So we're gonna go to sound and video shot cut. And rum roll. Very underwhelming, you don't see a lot of cute logos, there aren't any nasty pop ups, nothing like that. But you can just simply go to help and you see this about cute. And then of course, there is the licensing agreement and all that. So really, when you look at this, it's not really as bad as you think it would be. Now, there are other things going on here at playing, you need to understand that they are very much following the guidelines. You're going to have to do what's right for you in your situation. But yes, you can make money with open source. We're going to deep dive into just how you can do that. Let's talk about making money. First, we're going to talk about the support model, which is well, exactly what it sounds like you're going to support the software. Now, when I say support it, that can mean support anything from cute itself to software written in cute. A lot of open source software makes the money from support. Linux is a really, really great example of this because, well, Linux is open source, you can download it, change it, build your own distribution of Linux. But if you want support, guess what? You're going to have to pay someone for that. And most people walking around are not Linux experts, and they need some help. So a real good case study in the support model is I got a phone call one day saying, hey, we need help. We have an application that was written in cute. We know because it says about cute in the menu. And we need you to come in and help us figure it out. They weren't asking me to do any software changes. They weren't even asking me my knowledge about cute. They wanted me to look at the application and tell them how to use it because the developer had stopped developing it. So I charged them real money to show them how to use the application. I didn't even have to look at the source code. Next up is the modification model. And this one is where people get into trouble with the legality of things. So there's really two types of the modification model. First is someone will call you and say, hey, we have this software and we want you to modify it. And the second type is someone will call you and say, hey, we want you to modify cute to do what we want it to do. That's where you're going to get in trouble is that second type. So the first type, modifying someone else's software or just modifying software that you've written, I get those calls constantly. I actually have an email template queued up and ready to go saying, I'm sorry, I'm not looking for additional work at this time, just because I get so many of those emails. So this as long as you make the changes, open source is perfectly fine and safe. People do this all the time. You go out to pretty much any source code repository and the source code is just sitting there. People download it and change it. Legally, you're supposed to give those changes back and you very much should do that. But understand, you cannot really charge for that code. You can charge for your time that developing that code. So somebody comes to me and says, hey, we want you to modify this open source software. I say, here's my hourly rate. Now, if they want you to modify cute, that's where you have to be very careful and you have to sit them down and explain to them the legality and the licenses that any changes they make will not be proprietary and will go back to the open source community. A lot of people get in trouble. So be careful. Lastly is the training model. Let's face it. C++ has a massive learning curve and cute is built on top of C++ and also has a humongous learning curve. Once you get these two technologies down, people will pay you real money for your knowledge. I know because I fall into this category. I train people out on udemy.com. I'll put a link down below. You can check out my classes and see the format. There are other digital instructors that do the same thing and there's companies out there that charge tens of thousands of dollars to, well, go to your location and train you or fly you to them and have you sit in their classrooms. Alright, I hope you found this video educational entertaining. Drop a comment below and let me know what you think and, as always, go out and create awesome things.