This will be a very strange question but bare with me. I'm doing a simple fake terminal emulator for a design project someone wants me to do and I want to be 100% sure I am not breaking any copywritten content. Obviously the individual words or abbreviations are not copywritten but as a whole if I make a something that looks and acts like terminal, is there an issue?
Note: this is for commercial purposes as this fake terminal will be on a website that will be making money for a small franchise.
In general, source code can be copyrighted by the author of the code, but the dynamic output of running that code can be copyrighted by the user of that code. In this case, that's you.
Making something that looks and acts like an interactive bash terminal (or dash or zsg or csh, etc.) does not infringe upon any copyright or patent. Indeed, those terminals' behavior were themselves careful re-implementations of older Unix terminal behavior, so you have clearly-demonstrated prior art dating back several decades.
I would tend to agree with user535733, but I feel the need to caveat that it also depends on the source code you're using. If you've created all of it, then it's yours, but if you've used anyone else's source code, ensure you're aware of any requirements/restrictions they may have written if it is used, particularly in a commercial setting. This definitely holds true for commercial software and can be a potential Pandora's box if not managed correctly.
Great question!
