Do you really own your website?  This is a good question, and it isn’t really near as black and white as one would imagine.  It’s sometimes helpful to have an example to speak of, so we’ll talk about Joe, who just had a website built for him by the fictitious Acme Web Company.  When Acme gets to the point of actually building the website for Joe, they will use many processes, tools and code libraries.  These assets may have been created by themselves, or they are acquired from other companies.

So, if its Joe’s website, but Acme used its own tools, in-house utilities, code, or systems to produce it, who actually owns it?  Lets look at things from both Joe’s and Acme’s perspectives.

Joe’s Assertion:  Joe believes that he owns the rights to his website, all of the back-end code, HTML, content, all of it!  Joe paid good money and in all senses of the word “buy”, believes that he is the rightful owner.  Fair enough, this seems sane to Joe and probably most people who pay a lot of money for a website.

Acme’s Assertion: They provided a bid to Joe knowing that they would be able to leverage their internal systems, code libraries, and processes to make Joe’s website a reality, and have no intention of giving ownership of any existing assets they brought to the table to Joe beyond fulfilling their contractual obligation to fulfill the functional and design requirements for his site.  This seems sane too, it would be like asking the plumber to leave his toolbox, tools, and van after he installed your new kitchen.

So who is right, who really owns the site, and why would it even matter?

Just about every web shop on the planet leverages modern tools which give themselves, and the clients a competitive advantage.  These tools are sometimes in-house creations, though more often, they are tools which are written by other people and either purchased by or licensed to the web shop.  Examples of these tools are not trivial, they include Content Management Systems, Javascript libraries ( all those fancy menus, forms, and web widgets you see ) and a slew of tools used for security, database interactions, and well… you get the picture.  Ownership per se, is almost always an issue which revolves around licensing.

So what part does licensing play in all this, just tell us if it is Joe’s website or not and why should we care?

Imagine for a second that Joe wants to move his website to another hosting provider.  Acme says “OK Joe, were sad to see you leave but here is your site in a nice zip file”.  Joe and his new hosting company setup his website, but Joe realizes that it doesn’t function anymore.  Joe is beside himself and calls up Acme demanding the “right” version, the “working” version of his website.  Acme responds with “we did, we didn’t sell you ownership of many of the tools your site uses, we sold you a license to use them while you were with us”.  This is a bad place to be, because the reality is that the web shop really didn’t clarify in “human” terms, what it meant to “own” the website.  Joe is of course none too happy and is now faced with paying someone else to make his site work again.

So little code is actually written from scratch these days web wise, that its almost a foregone conclusion that the buyer of a website does not actually own a full functional version of their website.  Granted, there are exceptions!  So are we all doomed or what, a little light at the end of the tunnel please!

The answer here is to be an informed buyer and asking questions like:

• Please tell me about the systems you use and any respective constraints or restrictions I might face if I buy my website from you and decide to move to another host later on?
• Will my site still function if I choose another hosting provider other than you?
• Are there any specific rights I am granted by the tools you might use?  Reference the General Public License.
• Tell me about any specific obligations you have to me with respect to the tools you use.
• Will you indemnify me of claims if one of the authors of the tools you use comes after me because he saw that my site uses his new fancy web widget?
• Can I sell copies of my new website to other people?
• Can I sell subscriptions or sub-license my new web site to other people?

Any web shop worth their salt should be happy to discuss this with you and answer your questions.  Many companies don’t want to talk about it, because they are afraid of their private code or systems getting into the hands of competitors, that it might kill the sale, or that god forbid the client actually becomes educated. Reputable web shops should be able to spell it out in clear terms to you, you deserve to know.  This post is a rather cursory overview of the subject, but should be enough to get you going in the right direction if you have any interest in the topic.

Here is a list of the more common licenses that are attached to most everything you see on the web:

• GNU Lesser Public License
• GNU Public License
• MIT License
• Apache License
• BSD License

/John Ensign