On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 9:51 PM, Ashish Bhatia <[email protected]>wrote:
> Dear LUG Members, > > Imagine I develop a software [not dependent on any library at all] and > I "release" binary under GNU GPL, now as I understand from the GPL, > anyone in public who has the binary can legally force me to provide > him/her the source code in usable form. But imagine if the binary is > released under BSD license, while anyone can still reverse engineer > the binary and redistribute it legally, can he/she force me to provide > the source code? > > I might be wrong but my understanding based on > http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php suggests that > releasing only binary does not violate any condition of the license > but does that mean that BSD is not a "free" license? [freedom to see > and modify source code is not available] > > Note: I have already googled for this a lot and the only thing which > comes up is that "if you take the BSD licensed code, modify it then no > one can force you to release the binary but I have not found any page > which talks about whether releasing code is actually necessary at all > in the first place when the licensing is BSD" > > This question is redundant IMHO. One needs to bother about picking licences appropriately only if you want to release source code or want some software to be developed/examined collaboratively. If you are releasing only binaries only and want to allow to be used free, then it can also be a proprietary licence enabling free usage of the binary. Most licences, excepting GPL, like BSD allow folks to take published source code, modify them for their use/ products and choose whether to contribute the changes back to the community or not. The core stipulation in most of these is acknowledgement of copyright. -- Mohan Sundaram _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
