The key part of the GPL license that poisons its use for commercial purposes is the very first clause:
0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. If your program makes use of a piece of GPL code and will not function without it – it is considered a derivative work and must be distributed under the GPL license. We had to remove the MySQL JDBC driver from our software that we used to ship as a convenience for customers. They can download it themselves and use it – but we can not supply it as part of our commercial product. The SAP/Oracle lawsuit was based on the fact that even though you can download anything for free off Oracle's website to evaluate – you are still bound by the terms of the license agreement that you have to agree to get the software, regardless if you read and or understand it. Whether it is distributing a jar that should be paid for, or using a component in an unlicensed manner either of those things are cause for a lawsuit. Especially if you are a large company with deep pockets Dov On 5/12/11 10:28 AM, "Ramsey Gurley" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On May 12, 2011, at 8:43 AM, Dov Rosenberg wrote: Depends if you want to make money from your app or not. In either case the license that you release your app under can't violate the terms of any of the components included in your app. If you included GPL licensed components – it would be a violation of the GPL license to charge money for your app. See the note from the GPL v2 license below 2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: … b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. I'm sorry... am I misreading something? http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html That section is based on the opening statement. I'm not a lawyer, but I like to believe I have a pretty firm grasp of the english language. As far as I can tell, 2 b) only applies if you first "modify your copy or copies of the Program". Nowhere does it state that including a GPL'ed binary library in your app forbids you from selling your own code under any license you see fit. To further clarify 2 a) b) and c), the license immediately follows with: "These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works" Regarding the article you linked to, I don't see any mention of OSS or GPL anywhere. It appears to be an article about piracy of commercial enterprise software. I certainly didn't see any corroborating information or case law which would interpret the above statements as: "it would be a violation of the GPL license to charge money for your app" Ramsey _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Webobjects-dev mailing list ([email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/webobjects-dev/drosenberg%40inquira.com This email sent to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Webobjects-dev mailing list ([email protected]) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/webobjects-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [email protected]
