Shawn K. Quinn wrote: [..] > Nothing in the GPL prohibits commercial use of code released under the > GPL. It is perfectly fine to sell copies of GPLed code at any price. > What is *not* perfectly fine is to sell copies of GPLed code without > allowing access to the source code.
Not exactly. The copyright owner can sell it for any price they want and doesn't have to give their code away in any way. They can also sell it as a binary+source. Their pick, full power to the original author. Now the moment that somebody else gets the code they can either: - sell it on in giving away source+binary - give it away to everybody they want What the non-copyright owner can't do though is share the binaries with others. When one shares the binary one also has to share the source and all the changes made. As long as the non-copyright owner keeps the source and keeps the binary they don't have to distribute either. The moment they sell/pass it on though, eg a linksys box, they must give it away. This portion limits "commercial usage" as anybody who wants to extend it to make it do what they want, taking just a simple basis and adding a load of options to it, they still have to provide also the source when they pass on the binary to the third party. For me that is unacceptable. I either give my code away for everybody to peruse or I keep it locked up in a closet. GPL is good though if you want to force people to give back the code to you so that you can use it in your own dual-licensed projects. For people wanting true freedom of their code use: BSD or ISC it ;) Tip for coders: Start a lousy little project that many people will like, then release it as GPL, then if lucky people will use it and give you patches, now you can sell it back to them ;) Okay, that stops at the moment you have other people's code in there which you can't dual-license though, and that is the fun of GPL: you cripple yourself. > The GPL is not about limiting commerical use of software. The GPL is > about preserving freedom (i.e. "share and share alike"). The GNU Ada > compiler is commerical software, which also happens to be released under > the GPL. That is simply dual-licensing, something different altogether ;) See above for a nasty trick there though. Greets, Jeroen [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]
