I am planning on developing paid Plugins and using awesome Javascript libraries and/or Apis and converting them into Plugins for the Bubble Ecosystem. I was just wondering if there are any legal issues in doing this. Most of these external libraries are open source, but I would still like to charge money for the time and effort I put in to create the plugin. Am I allowed to create Plugins without prior permission? There are various commercial plugins in the Bubble plugin store that make use of external apis and frameworks of other companies (such as the Flickr API). Please let me know what your thoughts are.
For APIs, wouldn’t we be getting paid for our sweat equity in building the Plugin or Template?
The final onus for obtaining a licensing key for the API is on the final website developer, our customers? They need to pay for higher bandwidth and any commercial licensing?
I’m no legal expert, but as someone also in that situation my guideline is to simply read the licenses of the library and API I want to work with.
If you want to integrate a library into your plugin, you can do so according to the library license.
Libraries that are under Apache 2.0 and MIT licenses are good for commercial plugins, but GPL isn’t. You can still charge for a plugin using library under GPL code, but you’ll also have to release the plugin’s code for free, so one would be able to sidestep you and copy your commercial plugin with one click. So a GPL licensed library is better for free plugins.
Note that your plugin has its own licensing. Here in Bubble marketplace free plugins are automatically MIT. Paid ones I’m unsure about.
Regarding APIs, simply building a piece to connect with it doesn’t makes the code theirs. The connector is yours, and as said before, the key and authentication part will be the app maker’s (plugin user) responsibility.
However, do read the licensing and other terms of use of the specific library and API you want to integrate to avoid any trouble.
EDIT: Take a look at this https://tldrlegal.com/, that helped me better understand all of that license stuff.
