Hello,
I searched on the forum if there were any posts about copyright/patents for Bubble. How does this work exactly? If I create an app, does bubble own part of it? Also, if I were to launch my app from Bubble and down the road somebody copies that app, are there legal issues there?
Thanks! Just a question I thought about.
Our FAQ covers a lot of this.
The basic rule: you own your data. This includes the design of your application and the data that your users upload (pursuant to your own agreement with them, of course). We support automatically exporting user-created data in the form of CSV files. For other types of data export, contact us: we’ll make it work for you. Bubble apps can only be run on the Bubble platform; there’s no way of exporting your application as code. If you decide to move off the Bubble platform, you’ll have to rebuild the application logic, although we can help you export the design. We’ll do our best to help you leave if you want to. Our goal, though, is for Bubble to grow with your app; via our javascript and API integrations, you’ll never hit a hard limit of the system, and we plan to keep our pricing competitive with the cost of building out your own engineering team and infrastructure. Finally, we want to make sure you feel secure about building on the Bubble platform, so, although we plan to be around for a very long time, here’s our guarantee: if we ever for some reason have to close down shop, we will release the Bubble source code under an open-source license so that you can set up your own Bubble server and keep your app running.
Essentially, you own your design, workflows, Bubble owns the code that runs it, that is generic and shared among all apps. It’s a bit like MS Word. If you write a book, you own the book, but Microsoft owns the software that displays it.
