an interesting way to use the GPL

[lawgon]

As we all know, software is not a commodity to be bought and sold. The attempt to treat it like a commodity has caused a huge number of problems as well as colossal waste of money and programmers time. So the foss movement was started so that software can be shared freely across the world. And many licenses came into being in order to have some

Comments

What is the actual issue? GPL doesn't prohibit selling to any no of people

[ext_300022]

>> What he does is hide in a closet and develop his software

Re: What is the actual issue? GPL doesn't prohibit selling to any no of people

[lawgon]

GPL does not prohibit child pornography, trafficking in women or spitting on the sidewalk - so we can do all this? There will be eternal confusion as to which came first - the chicken or the egg. But there is not even an iota of confusion on which came first - the concept that software should be free and open source or the concept of creating licenses to protect and regulate the process of open sourcing software

Re: What is the actual issue? GPL doesn't prohibit selling to any no of people

[ext_300022]

Child pornography, trafficking in women and spitting in sidewalk has nothing to do with the license. Inclusion of any such restriction would make the license less free. These things have to be handled by the law of the specific country. Let's not software license dictate terms which it is not meant to do

Re: What is the actual issue? GPL doesn't prohibit selling to any no of people

[lawgon]

>> but making money by selling software as a product is disgusting.
How about you have the copyright ownership to the code you are selling? Is it still disgusting?

yes - unless you sell the copyright. Otherwise you are just selling the right to use a copy - while retaining the ownership.

>> What right does one have to sell software?
If you are the owner, you have the right. 100% rights.

not to sell the software - only to sell the copyright

I have seen many software companies in Bangalore developing proprietary software and bundling boost libraries with their software. I think they are charging for their software and not for the boost libraries. If Boost was under a strong copyleft license, they would have been forced to release the bundled boost code.

boost license is classic BSD - so what is the problem.

If I develop a Free software to sell to multiple clients, then I should not be stopped. I can distribute it in two ways

Re: What is the actual issue? GPL doesn't prohibit selling to any no of people

[ext_300022]

>> yes - unless you sell the copyright. Otherwise you are just selling the right to use a copy - while retaining the ownership

Re: What is the actual issue? GPL doesn't prohibit selling to any no of people

[lawgon]

my business model: I develop applications for customers. They pay me - I write the code and they own the copyright. I am only selling my labour. But I convince them to release the code on the internet under the BSD license. This way I can reuse the code for my next customer, but will have to charge less as less labour is involved. The next guy I convince to also contribute to the original code - and so on. I win, they win and the general public wins.

Re: What is the actual issue? GPL doesn't prohibit selling to any no of people

[ext_300022]

This business model is great, provided that companies arn't worries so much about money than they are about support, uptime etc.

Still, you need to define what you meant by "selling software"? If you sell FOSS software, you have to share the code too. I am assuming you retain copyright. In this case what is meant by selling?

Re: What is the actual issue? GPL doesn't prohibit selling to any no of people

[lawgon]

Selling software means selling a copy of the code like microsoft does. Redhat does not sell software - it gives you a copy of the code, and charges for service, support etc. I do not retain copyright, I provide the labour and the company gets the copyright.