GPL is far from a straight forward licensing policy. This current excercise
will hopefully clear up a lot of things, at least for me. So I thank Gregor
for taking the initiative.
In the end, my approach either violates GPL or not. Let's keep the issues
with poor practice out of this. I will get around fixing them soon.
According the John Hasler GPL and cost of a software are two different
issue. I have a right to charge for execution of a software as long as I
(or my organisation) is the soul author. (Which the case with WTEST).
According to Ben Pfaff, GPL and software cost are contradictory.
My original intention of charging commercial users is to:
- recover the cost of web based distribution. This is perfectly legal
according to GPL and I don't think there will be much disagreement on this
one.
- provide additional service, training and enterprise level tools that
are
beoynd the scope of the basic WTEST release. GPL does not cover services
and enterprise level tools will not be released under GPL.
Hence, my request for commercial users to contact me.
I look forward to more discussion in this list on this one.
Bibhas Bhattacharya
>
> Gregor writes:
> > From your understanding: Would we be allowed to include this piece in
> > Debian (i.e. is it DFSG free) or is not not ?
>
> What he has done is release wtest under the GPL with the added condition
> that it is not free for commercial use and that you must get his
permission
> to use it to test commercial web sites. He can do this as long as he is
> the sole author.
>
> non-free.
>
> > That's all about the license terms, the actual (C++) source files don't
> > have a note on the author, nor a license plate nor a copyright line.
>
> It is poor practice not to put a copyright line in each file identifying
> the author and referencing the license file.
> --
