Re: Licences

[Jeff Creem <jcreem@yahoo.com>]

Martin Krischik wrote:
> Lucretia wrote:
> 
> 
>>After having waited absolutely ages for a GNAT from AdaCore, I was
>>supremely pissed off that they GPL'd it, as the extra tools are only
>>available through them. Now, I'm working on some code that wanted to
>>(attempt to ;-D) make money on.
> 
> 
> But you can sell GPL programs. There is nothing wrong with that. Almost all
> Linux distributors do it.
> 
> GPL means that you can't just take the work of others to incorporate into a
> closed source project - you have to give back to the comunity as well.
> 
> And actually: All the discussion has made me think and I consider to change
> the licence of the SouceForge projects I am administrating. Why should
> anyone take my work and make money with it in a *closed* *source* project 
> - That's freeloading.

As copyright holder this is of course your choice. It really depends on 
why you write and maintain these things in the first place. If your 
primary goal (or one of your primary goals) is Ada advocacy then 
changing the license is a bad idea. There will be those that cannot make 
use of something that is GPL. These tend to be the same people that 
would have a hard time getting their company to "buy" some software from 
some non-corporate entity via some sort of paypal thing.

Also as other have pointed out, using the GPL does not really imply 
"giving back to the community". It implies "giving freedom to your 
customers".

I could still feel free to release my program under the GPL and base it 
on a large # of GPL components and the original community that wrote the 
components I use may never see a single line show back up to them unless 
one of my customers decides to give it back.

If the program/support is sold for a small ammount of money then it 
would not be at all unexpected that the code might make its way back to 
the originbal project. But, if I can manage to sell it for a large sum 
of money then the only people buying it would be big companies. In this 
case (even without some real or percieved threat of lack of future 
support) it is unlikely that the code would ever make its way back. The 
big companies that pay for the software are not liekly to contribute it 
back (after all in their mind they just paid a lot of money for that 
software). The people that work there will probably not want to take it 
and contribute it back for fear of angering their employers.


Note I have (at times) been an AdaCore customer and don't recall any 
implicit or explicit "requests" to not make their source available 
(though others here seem to indicate this happens).. And yet after many 
many years I have not seen anyone "leak" GNAT code.