Richmond wrote: > On 09/02/2015 12:26 PM, Kaveh Bazargan wrote: >> >> On 2 September 2015 at 14:36, Fraser Gordon wrote: >>> >>> On 2 Sep 2015, at 10:03, Richmond wrote: >>>> Would it be permissible to sell a book with a CD strapped to its >>>> back containing community versions of LiveCode? >>> >>> Yes, that is allowed. As the Community engine is GPL’ed, you’d have >>> to include an offer to supply the source code for the engine, but >>> you can do this by having the source code on the CD too. >>> >> And indeed you could sell the CD by itself as well! > > No: I wouldn't do that.
You'd be in good company if you did: Richard Stallman himself used to sell floppies containing the GNU utilities, all of them distributed under the GNU Public License he'd invented. After all, he incurred costs in material and time to make those floppies, and felt those costs should be covered to allow him to continue doing so.
The GPL only address "free" as in "libre", and expresses no opinion about "free" as in "gratis".
We used to see CDs containing various Linux distributions for sale, and in some places you can still find them.
But in the Internet Age it's become very rare for anyone to charge a fee for a distribution of GPL-governed works, because the cost of distributing has now approached zero and the license grants explicit freedom to the recipient to also redistribute the source to anyone they like.
In many cases this makes it likely that one would have only a single sale, since the purchaser has the freedom to them make the source available themselves at a lower cost or even zero cost if they like.
That said, it's noteworthy that the Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal communities have a rather thriving world of commercially-sold add-ons for those CMSes, even with very explicit interpretation of GPL terms which consider not only libraries but even themes to be "derivative works" requiring GPL adoption downstream.
It's fully within the rights of anyone in those communities to redistribute any plugins, libraries, or themes at any price they like, even undercutting the original authors with a price of zero.
But interestingly, few do. They tend to support those who sell add-ons by encouraging others to pay the commercial price by obtaining them from the original author, rather than redistributing the add-ons themselves. There is no shame in doing otherwise, as it is indeed an explicit freedom granted in the license, but I find it interesting how those communities work.
Since LiveCode Ltd. makes LiveCode Community available at no cost, it doesn't harm them in any way if you were to collect a modest fee to cover the cost of CD manufacturing.
Still, it may be not only less expensive for you but also a benefit to the user to encourage them to download from livecode.com, if only to help ensure they're getting the most recent version. At the current pace of releases, any batch of CDs is likely to be outdated within just a couple weeks after manufacture.
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Systems Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web ____________________________________________________________________ ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
