On 1/17/06, Chris Colman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Is the swfmill code licensed in such as way that can be incorporated in a > commercial product without having to make the commercial product open > source? Like is the license LGPL like or more GPL like?
it's GPL. > Perhaps if Dan offered the software under a commercial license in addition > to the open source license then open source projects could continue to use > it for free but commercial products could use it if they paid a modest fee. > That way it would get even more users – and even some paying users! depends on what you mean by "use". use as in "creating SWFs with it, then publishing the SWFs" is ok independently of whether the SWF is open source or not, i.e. you can already use it for commercial work, just like you can use mtasc or gcc. that's the "normal" usage. the other "use" would be to build some software to create/read/manipulate SWFs, and to use swfmill or parts of its code in it (e.g. use swfmill as a library in the shipped product). in that case, the software would have to be published under the GPL or a compatible license. the difference between the GPL and the LGPL is that, if swfmill was LGPL, it could be used as a library even in commercial products, and only changes to the swfmill part would have to be made public, again under the LGPL. at least, that's how i understand it. note that i'm not a lawyer, just another user. that said, dual licensing is always an option. the GPL is just the default license under which swfmill is publicly available, that doesn't mean somebody who would want to use it as part of a commercial product couldn't ask Dan if he liked to provide it under a different license. as a rule of thumb, if you don't want to distribute swfmill itself (or parts of it), it doesn't matter that it's GPL. the SWFs you make with it are your property, and you can distribute them under whatever license you like. mark -- http://snafoo.org/ jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ swfmill mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/swfmill_osflash.org
