Not likely. Given that that attorneys, courts, and even most of the
people who argue for or against the GPL don't understand it, I probably
won't succeed where they all seem to fail. But I suppose the effort
would be educational.
Thanks,
Michael
But this is only for people that would like to know exactly *when* they
have to publish their derivative source. This is very limited, since
Open Source developement works different from closed source developement.
Free software is more of a community effort. If you just take Tryton and
put some proprietary stuff on top and then deliver to your customer you
can just add the source. If your customer doesn't publish it, it will
never see the light of day. You don't have to give your source to
anyone. Just the people you distribute to.
But in the free software community projects you don't want to do this
anyway. You try to send in your patches to the project itself, so you
they become part of the project. This way nobody works double. And you
can still sell it to your customer if you want to. Especially ERP stuff
is very specific. Most of it revolves around making it work for a very
specific customer. That is where your value is anyways. And if you
manage to add anything meaningful to the project, your changes will be
included in updates, that you can then sell to your customer again.
Because others will also have included useful upgrades.
You can still just try to sell closed source stuff together with Tryton
to your customer and you will most likely get away with it. Only your
customer can demand the source anyways. And if they don't, you are good
to go. There are numerous cases where the GPL is violated. Only a few
ever get prosecuted.
And even if your software is crafted very carefully in order not to step
on the GPL to keep it closed you would not adhere to the *spirit* of
free software. Same if you obfuscate your code and/or remove comments
before giving it to the customer on a cd to sit in a cupboard for example.
Cheers,
Malte
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