Kay C Lan wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 1:26 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
>
>> It is indeed confusing...
>>
>> But whether it's "detrimental" is a matter of taste.
>
> If Peter finally decides NOT to make his lcStackBrowser available
> to LC Community Edition Users due to confusion and concern as to
> whether the GPL applies then that would be a loss to the Community
> Users and a few less sales for Peter.
That would be the case if the only version of LiveCode were the
GPL-governed Community Edition.
Peter has a license for the Commercial Edition, as do most of the pro
developers likely to spend money on tools.
The Commercial Edition still exists, and as such nothing has changed there.
Now we have an addition to the mix, the newer Community Edition. If any
aspect of distributing to that new audience causes concern about that
specific deployment, it doesn't change what can be done with the
Commercial Edition we've been enjoying for decades.
My own personal opinion is that when using other people's code it's
useful to err on the side of a conservative interpretation until the
copyright holder says otherwise.
And here that's what happened: I'd cc'd Kevin with some of this thread
and this morning he explicitly stated here that he sees no copyright
infringement with regard to IDE tools made with the Commercial Edition
distributed to users of the Community Edition:
<http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2015-January/209927.html>
As with so many things in life, it rarely hurts to ask. At worst you'll
know the boundaries of what can and cannot be done, and at best you may
get exactly what you want.
As the copyright holder Kevin's opinion is the most relevant, defining
for us what can be done with his company's intellectual property.
It's worth noting, though, that his intentions are more liberal than
that of the respective counsels for the Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal
projects, in which their argument is that merely making calls to their
APIs and sharing execution memory space is enough to satisfy the
definition of "derivative work".
Personally I prefer Kevin's view, and in my reading it's more sensible
than that of Drupal/Wordpress/Joomla. But since I'm not the copyright
holder for LiveCode or Drupal/Joomla/Wordpress my personal preference is
irrelevant; I've been unable to persuade anyone in the Wordpress project
to adopt my personal preferences. :)
Given the many and ever-growing ways code can co-mingle during
execution, we may never see a concise legally binding definition of
"derivative work". So for myself, I like to check with the copyright
holder.
> And as you point out yourself, a healthy libraries, plug-ins and
> widgets environment is good not just for users but for Runrev
> as well.
I wrote that in support of Simon's observation that many of the add-ons
for Wordpress are indeed financially viable for their developers, even
though that project explicitly considers all of them to be "derivative
works" which inherit the rights and responsibilities of the GPL.
As a distribution license, the GPL expresses no opinion about price.
GPL-governed works can be sold, and the requirement is that when the
sale is made the source is made available to the recipient of the
executable code.
In practical terms this often means reduced sales, since of course the
recipient of a GPL-governed work has the explicit freedom to
redistribute the work.
But as Simon noted, this is not necessarily a death knell for sales when
a tool is sufficiently useful and the community it serves is
sufficiently supportive.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Systems
Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
____________________________________________________________________
ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com
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