Hello,
I have a question about the "powered by" notice.  I do appreciate being able to use this software, for free no less, but I HATE having powered by notices on my site.  I noticed in the TRADEMARK_POLICY. txt file that it says something about being able to remove the notice:


Am I to understand that if I change my design (which I did), I can remove this powered by link?

If I misunderstood, is there any chance at all that I can pay for a license that allows me to use HCL link free? I know that A LOT of open source / free scripts offer this option now. 

Thanks for your time!

hello? 

Does anybody monitor these forums. . .  it doesn't look like many people are getting answers to their questions.  It seems kinda sad that you spend so much time developing a free software and then not offer any support or documentation to the people who want to use it.  I don't really see the point. 

> Am I to understand that if I change my design (which I did),
> I can remove this powered by link?

As far as I can tell:

a) it is reasonable that you eliminate the "powered by" from anything that goes to the client. 
Two points for this, at least: 1) no average client is usually interested in technical details; they just disturb, right in a spot where place is limited and attention is targeted to something else; 2) It would be crazy to have every single web page of ours infested with "powered by Apache", "powered by Python", "powered by Php", "powered by Mysql", "powered by Pmwiki", "powered by Debian Linux", "powered by HCL", "powered by Jquery", and a lot more.  Sure, we use them all, but. . .  see next. . .

b) it is reasonable that you keep any reference to HCL which appears behind the front end.
Which is to say, as an example, all the remarks you find in the html[1].  There is a point, an important one for this, as well: most of us, when in search for the right open-source tool, crawl the web and explore other people's pages (the html source, which is) to see and study how they did and what they used.  And here is where the "powered by" (or similar notice) must be: just where the right people are looking for it.

This all makes sense to me.

Luigi


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[1] Just to show an example:
<!-- BEGIN Help Center Live Code, Copyright (c) 2005 Help Center Live.  All Rights Reserved -->

THANK YOU Luigi :) :)
Its helpful to hear someone else's take on the trademark notice (its sometimes hard to understand those things).  I will go ahead and remove the powered by notice on my chat window and keep everything else as-is (unless admin jumps in and says otherwise). 

Thanks so much for taking the time to reply!!
Bianca

Take a look at the documentation that's included with the download, it clearly states your privileges associated with the use of the script, and our rights.

We'll consider some 'pay to remove' option, but for now the existing license agreement is very detailed.

Admin

I did look at the documentation and found conflicting statements hence the reason why I posted this question in the forum.  Was my understanding of the policy correct or not??

You cannot remove our back-links, copyright notices, etc.

Tell me what you found conflicting and we'll have our counsel make clarifications and/or corrections as required.

I already posted a quote from the file in my first post ^^^
Its says if we change the theme, we can modify the copyright notice but that the back end copyright announcement must still exist.  That seems a little conflicting from what you said.  I'm not a lawyer but it sounds like its saying that if we change our design, we can modify the copyright notice as long as we keep the notice in the back-end. 

What that notice means is:

If you change the default copyrighted theme included with Help Center Live, with a custom theme, then you MUST replace the notices with the deployment of your new theme.

To be in compliance with the license, you could make this a small 'Powered by HCL' (or similar) text or logo based link, that's not obtrusive, follows your theme, and includes the back link to us.

Your reading that by making a custom theme allows you to remove the copyright and back-link credits is not correct.

okay thanks for clearing that up. 
Do you have any estimate as to when the paid license might be available? This is a really good option because it gives people the choice of whether or not to keep back links AND you make some greatly deserved money on your product :)

I really hope we can see this soon, at least a basic beginning stage of it. 

Version three, which we're testing now, address that concern...