William Ballard wrote: > I'm hacking together a little prototype for somebody, mostly as > a curiosity and kindness. It'll be just a prototype. > If they like it, I'll flesh it out and charge them money. > > Regardless, I'd like to put the prototype on SourceForge. > (It might help close a sale.) > > Do I need some kind of dual license?
If you are the only copyright holder, you can license any copy in any way you like, regardless of the history of the code's licensing. So you can certainly do what you propose. One thing to consider: once you have released the prototype under an open source license, there is nothing to stop someone else from forking it and adding features to compete with your final commercial product. And if the license in question is the GPL, you will not be able to merge new code from the fork back into your product (without the permission of the forker). Finally, don't sell anyone the _copyright_ on the commercial product, or they might conceivably be able to sue you for continuing to distribute the open source prototype! The case of Eric Weisstein being sued by CRC over his "World of Mathematics" a.k.a. http://mathworld.wolfram.com comes to mind: http://slashdot.org/yro/01/11/06/2028252.shtml ObDisclaimer: IANAL, and you might get better advice on debian-legal. regards, -- Kevin B. McCarty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Physics Department WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University GPG public key ID: 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
