| Re: License breakdown [message #6832 is a reply to message #6828] |
Sun, 24 September 2006 19:56  |
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scythe
Messages: 22
Registered: December 2005
Location: Hungary
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Junior Member |
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| dlzinc wrote on Sun, 24 September 2006 20:57 |
As with any legal issues, "we're not lawyers and you should find one who is well versed in these issues before stepping into legal ground you're not sure of".
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Exactly.
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D-Link's case is their refusal to provide the source at all. It didn't come with the product (3.a), and they wouldn't provide it to people who asked D-Link for it (3.b), and 3.c doesn't apply. If they shipped it on a CD or DVD when they were asked for it, they wouldn't need to stop selling the product. I would *guess* that there was something in the source they couldn't send out for other legal reasons, which is why they had to discontinue it.
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Agree. Thought that too, probably some kernel patch/module for their hardware, which was written by the hw's manufacturer under strict licensing or OCO.
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Sveasoft was doing 3.a, so they're okay for that. But their terms of service states that you can't redistribute the source, which is a violation of the GPL (section 4-6).
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Agree too.
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The GPL doesn't prevent you from selling the sourcecode as a whole if you don't provide binaries, but does prevent you from preventing others from redistributing the source. So I could take OpenVZ, make some crazy modifications to it and make it perform 1000x faster (let's say), and sell this source for $1 million, but there's nothing stopping whoever buys the source from putting it on the internet.
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So in this case You wrote a great patch for GPL, which You sell for 1 person, who then legally distributes it for free. This means You can sell GPL, but it's pointless, as it will soon be accessible for free and You can't get any more profit from that version of software. So selling support still looks more reasonable for me.
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DD-WRT (another Linksys firmware mod) has a "special" version with extra features not in the public version that they sell. You can't get the binary or source for the "special" version without being a member. They encourage people not to redistribute the source code so it keeps its value, but they don't do anything to prevent people from doing so. (which is fully legal)
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As I stated above, You can do this, but it seems to me to be kinda pointless...
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