On 04/09/2011 04:10 PM, Omer Zak wrote: > IANAL either. > > But what you are looking for is, in principle, dual licensing. > The providers of MySQL and Qt follow the same model. Their software > libraries are available under either GPL (with all the restrictions it > entails) or under a proprietary license. >
Nitpick: In addition to GPL, Qt is LGPL (v2.1) licensed since 2009. > When a client of yours gets your software under proprietary license, you > are free to impose whichever terms you want upon them, including terms > under which they are allowed to transfer the software to third parties. > > --- Omer > Cheers -- Meir > > On Sat, 2011-04-09 at 15:50 +0300, Aviad Mandel wrote: >> Hi list, >> >> I know you're not lawyers, but I though you could help me with a GPL >> issue. >> >> I'm writing a function library in C which I want to sell licenses for, >> targeting a specialized industry. To make my entry point better, I >> plan to release it under GPL (as opposed to LGPL) so that potential >> users can evaluate it properly before making a decision. My target >> industry is far far away from FOSS, so I'm pretty sure that they won't >> release their own code under GPL in order to adopt mine free (as in >> beer). >> >> So as long as I make sure I own all copyrights, will this work >> legally? >> >> Two main questions: >> >> (1) Is GPL giving me the enough protection? >> (2) Will GPL allow a company which hasn't bought a non-GPL license >> enough freedom to evaluate the library? >> >> What makes this slightly complicated, is what happens when company X >> decides to take my library and integrate it into their proprietary >> software for evaluation. Even for their internal copies, they can't >> badge the whole package as GPL, because they don't necessarily own the >> rights to all components, and may not even have all sources. >> >> So let's look at the case where the company has just linked my GPL'ed >> library with their proprietary source codes + proprietary libraries >> for which the company only has as binaries. >> >> Now person X wants to send a copy of the software's binary (my library >> included) to person Y, say over email. Under what conditions is it >> legal? If person Y works at the same company? For the same company >> (outsourcing)? Has access to everything necessary to build the >> software, so that person Y could in theory build the binary from >> software owned by the company + the library under GPL? > _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
