Creating a Commercial CustomNodes pack for ComfyUI: Best Practices and Considerations?

[jakerdy]

Hello everyone!

I'm currently exploring the possibility of developing set of custom node packs for a ComfyUI. While I am excited about the potential this project holds, I am keen on understanding how to approach the development of an extension that could be commercialized, while still respecting the obligations and principles of the GPL.

Here are a few specific points I am considering:

• GPL Compliance : What are the key aspects I should be mindful of to ensure my extension complies with the GPL license terms of the original project?
• Separation of Code : To what extent should the extension’s code be separate from the GPL-licensed code to maintain compliance and allow for commercialization?
• Dual Licensing : Is it possible or advisable to use a dual licensing strategy for my extension? If so, what are the best practices for implementing this?
• Distribution and Selling : What are the recommended approaches to distribute and sell the extension without violating the GPL terms?
• Using external Libraries under non GPL licenses: For example, if I have native DLL, under EULA or for example Apache, could I make comfy-ui wrapper with nodes exposing apis of my library?
• Redistributable packages : Is it ok to deliver ComfyUI as an installable "component package" within bigger system, that starts comfy in separate process, and talks to it via HTTP/WS. Of course with attribution, and clear specification that comfy used under the hood.

I would greatly appreciate insights, resources, or examples from anyone who has any experience in those aspect.

Also, giving that ComfyUI written in python, how does GPL applied to code written for ComfyUI?

Looking forward to your feedback and discussion.

[LonKeyDotae]

You could get answers to a lot of these questions by just pasting the license to chatgpt, but i digress.
This is not legal advice. Do you're own research before acting on any advice here.

for separation it's a pretty grey area i can only recommend that you create whatever functionality you're thinking of as a generic python library, then create comfyui nodes wrapping that license under gpl, from what i understand anything that isnt working through a standard interface like python libraries has to be licensed under gpl.

dual licensing doesn't really factor into this, so long as you've identified clearly what elements of the code don't have to be under gpl you can use whatever licensing strategy you want for that code.

Distribution permits a lot of commercialization, i'd recommend reading up on how people sell blender addons which also fall under gpl, basically you're allowed to sell gpl packages but technically the buyer is paying for the service of you distributing the code to them, the source code needs to be provided and the buyer is permitted to redistribute under gpl.

yes as above this is fine, this is what most custom nodes do already, though again best practice is to license under gpl for the wrapper, though you will see a lot of node repos licensed under apache and mit, so who knows, so long as it's an open source license it's probably fine, again do your own research.

having it as part of a larger package is closer to infringement but it's pretty context dependent, if the system relies on comfyui for all or even some features then it could be derivative, if you're simply allowing communication between comfyui and existing features in a package that don't use comfyui as the singular interface then that would be more permitted, any changes to the comfyui source code need to be made available under gpl though.
As a rule of thumb so long as it's clear any commercial gain is coming from value added by code developed independent of the framework provided by comfyui you're probably good. It's all fundamentally copyright law, so the vibes kinda matter for any judgement on whether something is derivative