[H-GEN] GPL -> Non-GPL licence change

Anthony Towns aj at azure.humbug.org.au
Fri Apr 12 10:31:30 EDT 2002


On Sat, Apr 13, 2002 at 12:16:16AM +1000, Ian Pulsford wrote:
> Anthony Towns wrote:
> > Uh, the GPL's actually a pretty good license for "if you want to use it
> > for commercial (read: proprietry, closed source) purposes, pay me money",
> > and that's the reason Qt is now available under the GPL.
> Proprietary?  No, because you have to release the sources to me freely
> accessibly or at a nominal fee for distribution media.

Alice writes some code, which she licenses under the GPL.  Bob takes
Alice's code, and wants to make a proprietry extension to it. He can't do
that under the GPL, so he rings up Alice and says "Hey, I'll pay $50,000
for a license that lets me make proprietry works based on your code".
Alice says "Let's do lunch."

If Carol sends a patch to Alice, though, Alice needs to make sure Carol
assigns copyright over to her so she can still make her big money deals.
Carol might want to insist on a cut in this case, or Alice may have
to refuse to accept some patches. But that's life in the proprietry
software world.

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.

     ``BAM! Science triumphs again!'' 
                    -- http://www.angryflower.com/vegeta.gif
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