On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 12:19:47AM +0100, Roy Wood wrote: > > In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Richard Zidlicky > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes > >> The problem here is that it does fragment the community - I see nothing in > >> the current licence which prevents giving the binaries away for nothing, > >> provided that the 10 Euro fee is still paid to TT for each new copy sold (or > >> given away), so long as you register as an authorised reseller. > > > >the problem is the license says otherwise, read it. It is 10 Euro now, it > >may be 50 Euro next year, nobody knows. Or perhaps someone does know but > >doesn't say. > Whatever makes anyone think that the licence fee might change ?
Read the license, if you need legal expertise ask Wolfgang. > >With this license Peter isn't sure he could provide even minor fixes for > >Q40/Q60 related issues free of cost to the user (actually afaics he is > >convinced to the opposite). If Wolfgang accepts some royalty financed > >extension to SMSQ in the meantime the user does have to buy a new license > >and pay the extra royalties just to get the free fixes - the requirement > >of a single official SMSQ version causes this. > The fee is a one off. IF you buy a copy of SMSQ/E or own a copy already > then any upgrade is free provided the author of the upgrade is not > asking for a fee. I have always only charged for postage when upgrading > SMSQ/E within the version number. I have also done it for free at shows. > Maybe the licence should specifically state this to avoid the spread of > paranoia. I have said this so many times now that my fingers can type it > in my sleep. I would very hapilly agree with you, unfortunately the license says something completely different. > >I consider getting free bugfixes say at the basis of current functionality > >pretty essential. The people *have* paid the license so all bugfixes must > >be free unless they require complete rewrite of the code. And availablity > >of bugfixes *must* be independent of the purchase of some new fancy > >extension that will almost certainly introduce a whole load of new bugs. > This is the reason for the licence. There may be someone who wants to > write an extension and get paid for it. We hope that most of these will > be modules which can be added onto the code by the user (fairly simple > to do) so we really hope to try to keep all upgrades free. I would hope this too but that is not quite enough. I am pretty good at reading licenses, not someone else' mind so all I can see is this license. If you want the license to say something else than it says now, change it to say what you mean. Richard
