On Wed, Feb 13, 2002 at 03:42:07PM -0500, Roger Fujii wrote:
The solution as I see it is for GPL/BSD/whatever programmers to actually cough up something non-technical users not only would use, but would *prefer*. *Then* support and selling binaries becomes a worthwhile proposition.
you cannot sell *gpl binaries. You can sell the media, but not the content. Think sun has a good idea with dual licensing and having assignment of the copyright. This allows them to change the license so that they can make a productized version.
Since this is not the first time this mistruth show up in the discussion here, I think a clarification is warranted.
The second paragraph of section 1 of the GPL (v.2) states:
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
The only limits that the GPL places on sales is that once someone has received a copy of binaries from you, you can't sell them the SOURCE at an additional cost that's higher than your distribution cost. Up to that point, you can charge people whatever you want to for access to GPLed *content*. You just don't have any power to make sure that others don't sell that same content at a price lower than yours, or even give it away.
And although the LGPL is a different license (which is important to keep in mind when talking about '*gpl'), the same permission is granted by the LGPL to charge a fee (an arbitrary fee) for copies of the software.
Steve Langasek postmodern programmer