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

[Ian Pulsford]

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Anthony Towns wrote:
> 
> 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."

Bob can make all the proprietary extentions to Alice's code his heart
desires.  Only if he redistribute the total does he have to either GPL
it or make a deal with Alice.
But what is to to stop Roger, Nell, Arthur, Bill, Sam... from improving
on the original and rendering Bob's investment a big waste of money in a
couple of weeks (by undercutting the price of his product with
free(beer) software)?

> 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.

True, that scenario is the same with proprietary software as with free
software.  Copyright law applies equally to each.


Ian

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