Re: WTEST license conditions
Bibhas Bhattacharya writes:
> GPL is far from a straight forward licensing policy.
The GPL is one of the most straightforward of the properly drafted free
software licenses. It is the homebrew licenses that try to "leave out all
the legal gobbledygook" that are full of loopholes and unintended
consequences. Copyright law is byzantine.
> In the end, my approach either violates GPL or not.
The GPL is not a law. It is just model license: a set of terms under which
the FSF suggests that you release your software. The license you choose to
release your software under is a set of conditions under which you are
permitting recipients of copies to use it and to make and distribute
copies. As author, it is impossible for you to violate your own license,
since you are the only one who can sue to enforce it.
What you have done is release your software under a license which consists
of the GPL plus the added condition that it is not free for commercial use
and that users must get your permission to use it to test commercial web
sites. You have every right to do this, but as long as you do, your
program will not distributed by Debian. You also should consider that
"free for non-commercial use" has no clear legal meaning. The only safe
thing for users and distributors to do is assume the most conservative
meaning: nobody is permitted to make money from it in any way at all.
> My original intention of charging commercial users is to: - recover the
> cost of web based distribution. This is perfectly legal according to GPL
> and I don't think there will be much disagreement on this one.
Sounds like what you meant to do was to set up a sort of an e-commerce site
and sell copies of the software to commercial users (how would you identify
them?) while giving it to non-commercial users. The GPL does permit you
(or anyone else) to do this. This is not, however, what you did. You have
phrased and located your statements about commercial users in such a way
as to make them part of the license.
> - provide additional service, training and enterprise level tools that
> are beoynd the scope of the basic WTEST release. GPL does not cover
> services and enterprise level tools will not be released under GPL.
> Hence, my request for commercial users to contact me.
Take a close look at Brian's suggestion. I think it will permit you to do
what you want while releasing your software under an unmodified GPL.
--
John Hasler
john@dhh.gt.org (John Hasler)
Dancing Horse Hill
Elmwood, WI
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