Re: can one build commercial applications with latest gnat and other licenses related questions...

["Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

M E Leypold writes:
[about distributing a commercial program under GPL]
> Completely right. But: There is also the case when the customer wants
> the developer(s) to sign an NDA. Usually (happened too me) these
> customers are deeply uneasy with the GPL around. They fear (and I
> don't even know wether they are right) that they cannot bind the
> developers into not disclosing the code written under contract, and
> they fear that contact with GPL code "frees" their own code with all
> their methods and concepts. They are not sure and in a competitive
> situation (meaining multiple bidders) that means they don't touch the
> offer where they are not sure.

Suppose you write a program and license it to a customer. You are the
author, you own the copyright, therefore you can sell licenses to other
customers as well, and you can chose the license terms for each
customer. No law forces you to use the same terms for all customers,
but law allows you to sell or give away as many licenses as you like.
Therefore, even if you sell a proprietary, binary-only license to the
first customer, you can *still* sell GPL licenses, BSD licenses or
other licenses for the same program to other customers, and you can
*still* place your program in the public domain, post it on
SourceForge, or do whatever you want with it, since you own the
copyright.

The only thing the first customer can do to prevent that is to sign a
contract with you, whereby you assign your copyright to him (which as I
understand is not legal in Germany), or you agree not to distribute
your program to anyone else.  At this point, the GPL gives the four
freedoms to the (sole) licensee, while at the same time the contract
restricts *your* freedom to redistribute. If I were a customer, I would
systematically insist on such terms when I bought custom-made software.

> On can also just deliver mangled code to the customer with stripped
> comments and w/o documentation. One can do all that, but actually it's
> bending the spirit of GPL and obeying the letter only.

I agree, but as I explained, that's what you would do if you wanted to
prevent your customers from modifying your program. But as I understand
it, that's not the problem you have now; the problem is that your
customer wants to prevent *you* from distributing your programs to
their competitors, right? Only a contract can do that.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.