Where Fedora Went Wrong (nice conclusion)
Matej Cepl
mcepl at redhat.com
Fri May 18 07:52:21 UTC 2007
On 2007-05-18, 00:38 GMT, Les wrote:
> If someone (like me) creates some whooptidoo program that does
> something wonderful, can he/she sell that program commercially?
Yes, of course, you can sell commerically whatever you create
(after all, take a look at my email address -- yes, there is some
commerical software we are selling for exceptional purposes). RMS
position on this is <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html>.
``Free'' as in freedom (as distinguished from free as ``free
beer'') has nothing to do with paying price. There are two
caveats though (of course this is not complete analysis of GPL,
for that consult your lawyer):
a) if you use any GPL-covered source code in your software
(of if otherwise required by the licenses of the libraries
you link against, etc.), you have to make your source code
available as well,
b) whole stuff about patents (quite interesting right now,
but it would take too long to explain in one email).
There are many companies which are able to sell software with
these limitations (see for example theKompany
http://www.thekompany.com/home/ as just one example which came to
my mind). And of course, if you use non-GPL free software (again
take a look at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html to
understand these distinctions), you may be not bound to release
software -- take a look at EnterpriseDB
<http://www.enterprisedb.com/>, the guys there are extending
PostgreSQL <http://www.postgresql.org/> to make it more
compatible with OracleDB and they are selling it for money.
This is one of the few situations, where I feel a duty to add,
that nothing in this email has anything to do with opinions of my
employer, I have no clue how good service these companies
provide, and I am not a lawyer anymore, so nothing here
constitutes legal advice.
Best,
Matej
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