Chris Hayes wrote:
you absolutely *may* sell gpl'd code - that's why you see boxed sets of Linux distributions on the shelves.At 17:17 22-1-03, you wrote:I was wondering what the licensing issues for app frameworks (or any
included PHP classes/libs) are. I'm creating a rather large PHP
application for a company, and they'd like to potentially resell it to
some of their customers.
Can I safely use GPL'd libraries, classes, etc. (i.e. PearDB) and
resources that fall under other open source licenses when developing the
app and let them redistribute accordingly, or would that be a violation?
Also, thinking ahead here a bit, if they wanted to use something like Zend
Encoder on the project, what sort of added gotchas could that bring up?
Thanks guys!
John
The GPL can be a headache to figure out when it gets to complicated situations.
My uneducated working conclusion is that the GPL prevents you from selling GPL-ed code as is, or improved GPL-ed code. Selling GPL-ed code, even if you improved it, is dead wrong. Even if you eventually totally rewrote the code.
It's just that if you take gpl'd code and modify it - then when you release it to a third party (whether you charge money or not) you must release this new version also under the gpl.
The GPL is incompatible with per-seat licenses and the third party is free to copy and if they wish, resell your code.
So traditional models of selling computer software don't all work with gpl'd code.
However - if you want to sell software under a closed licence you will need to be carefull to avoid 'linking' with gpl'd code.
The problem is that 'linking' as used in the gpl seems to refer to C programming - and is an unclear term when refering to php.
I'm sorry if that fails to give a clear cut answer - this sort of thing does not seem to have been testing in the courts yet ...
--
Sean
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