Hi, I'm not a lawyer but my first feeling is the same as Geoff: I think you can't re-sale an OpenERP module without providing a free GPL copy of it publicly. That's exactly why the GPL has been designed for: to ensure nobody will kill the editor efforts by salling small upgrades of their own without re-distributing it. Only some editors can eventually do that by double licensing their work (just like MySQL for instance). I've never heard that Tiny was double licensing though. The only thing that the GPL permit I think is that one time you develop a solution for a given customer you never re-distribute (the customer doesn't want to publish it). Once you start re-distributing it, advertising it just like you were doing on this forum, I suspect that's a GPL violation and you could be potentially sued just as other have been buy the Free Software Foundation for instance. Anyway, I hope things can get all right before it gets bad eventually.
By the way, about that: this is a message for Tiny: I think you should protect you against future licensing conflicts by issuing a license agreement for the community committers like us. you can look at what Sun or Mozilla did. I think that might be a good move to avoid people to later on try to hijack the license. For instance it took so long for Sun to release the full version of the open jdk just because fucking bastards were not ready to open source what they previously contributed (media stuff for instance). Also bare in mind that a few lawyers companies are just making a business in trying to find licensing holes (remember the .gif story?). So since OpenERP is now getting very big I think it might be a good move to protect you against all those nasty tricks. It's not paranoia but how knows how will react ERP editors when they will finally feel threaten by OpenERP? An other very hot licensing issue: your licence is GPL v3, not AGPL v3, meaning that I can go to a cheap country and invest to offer OpenERP as as service with upgrades and beat you down the line. Why that? why didn't you choose the Affero GPL3 instead? ERP is a wild world... Raphaël Valyi. ------------------------ http://www.smile.fr -------------------- m2f -------------------- -- http://www.openobject.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=35044#35044 -------------------- m2f --------------------
_______________________________________________ Tinyerp-users mailing list http://tiny.be/mailman/listinfo/tinyerp-users
