

Ask HN: If you build your $1B company on an HTML template, will you be sued? - hoodoof

Say you start off in your pyjamas in your lounge room eating toast and writing code.<p>You buy a template from, for arguments sakes, ThemeForest or WrapBootstrap.<p>You code and code and code until your masterpiece is complete.<p>People LOVE what you built.  Within a year Bill Zuckerberg-Ellison buys your company for $1B.<p>Might you get a letter from the template designer saying &quot;hang on that&#x27;s my IP and you sold it now I want $500M&quot;?
======
byoung2
Themeforest templates have a license that states what you can do with it, so
you would be fine if you were within the terms of the license. That said, you
could easily change an HTML template to something custom long before any
acquisition if you wanted to avoid the issue.

------
icedchai
This would be a nice problem to worry about.

------
petercooper
It depends if Hooli designed your template.

------
MichaelCrawford
This is why every developer should not just read but understand the licenses
to everything they use.

In my experience very few actually do.

