Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2000 01:19:12 +0530 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Frank Warren <clovis@home.com> Cc: "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@nwlink.com>, Postmaster <webmaster@radikal.net>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Copyright and payment Message-ID: <20000728011912.A11069@physics.iisc.ernet.in> In-Reply-To: <046f01bff7f5$eb8ae5e0$63770118@lvrmr1.sfba.home.com>; from clovis@home.com on Thu, Jul 27, 2000 at 11:10:17AM -0700 References: <Pine.SOL.3.96.1000726232722.7653B-100000@utah> <046f01bff7f5$eb8ae5e0$63770118@lvrmr1.sfba.home.com>
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Frank Warren said on Jul 27, 2000 at 11:10:17: > There is a great deal of misunderstanding here. FreeBSD does not really > refer to it being available at no cost. It refers to INTELLECTUAL freedom. > You can "own" this code if you like, and charge what you like and think is > apt depending on your value-add. You can take it private. GPL code you > cannot. You MUST make the source available to everyone no matter what you > do. You can of course do value-add to GPL code ,and charge for it, but > there's no point to paying for it as the source must be released on demand. I've seen this piece of misinformation so often in FreeBSD lists, I don't know whether it's worth getting into it yet again. The source must be released on demand *to someone to whom you have given the binaries* -- not to just anyone who asks for it. And the distribution of binaries and source must be under the GPL. In principle one can think of a situation where you refuse to distribute your program publicly via an FTP site, but sell it to someone under the GPL. It may quite likely work for custom written code, if the customer does not want to redistribute it (Cygnus does that with custom modifications to gcc, I was told) and it does not conflict with the GPL at all. Of course, any widely useful software would probably get redistributed for free somewhere down the line, and perhaps put up on a ftp site; in practice, most authors distribute it for free themselves. > put anything under the GPL. It no longer can belong to you at all. It may > have been all your new, original code, but once under GPL, it belongs to > FSF, and you can't get it back. You can't get back the modified version which has been "contaminated" with GPL code under other peoples' copyrights. You can certainly retain your original unmodified code and do what you like to it. If you're uncomfortable with that, remember that you're only being stopped from making proprietary use of someone else's free contribution to your code. What you wrote is yours, whether originally under the BSD or the GPL license, and if it stands by itself and works, nobody can stop you doing what you want with it. (Unless you donated the copyrights to someone else like the FSF, which is often done but is not a GPL requirement at all). The GPL is not a perfect license, but these flamefests against it are silly and the amount of misinformation about it that goes on unchallenged in the FreeBSD lists is just amazing. Rahul. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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