On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 12:17 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-09-30 at 00:27 +0530, kish wrote: > > I have seen organisations charge for services for OSS. > > > > Some even produce complete products that use OSS along with other > > custom-developed(proprietary) apps and sell them. > > > > Wouldn't it be illegal to market a suite of OSS customized to a > > particular business requirement and hosted on > > a private cloud or whatever(making it a service)? > > > > All the while re-branding the underlying OSS, thereby to some degree > > hiding the facts from customers. > > > > Do open licenses allow this kind of freedom? > > which license are you talking about? as far as BSD license is concerned, > you can make the app proprietary and sell it too, as long as you change > the name and do not claim that the original authors have anything to do > with it. For GPL you cannot do this - other licenses have varying > restrictions - GPL most restrictive and BSD most free. > > As long its a service that is built using software components (OSS, propreitary, whatever) then the vendor is not encumbered in any way. That is, as long as the software components are not under Affero GPL. Thats why its legal for google to run its infrastructure on a modified linux kernel and still not share the modifications with its users. _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
