Rev/Livecode project and GPL Licenses

Mark Schonewille m.schonewille at economy-x-talk.com
Mon Apr 18 15:17:44 EDT 2011


Hi,

The trick is to provide a quality of services that's worth paying for, including compiled binaries, while at the same time keeping the open-source community at a big distance away from your commercial product. You could also try to focus your open-source project on Unix flavours while focusing your commercial project on Windows.

An example is Parallels, which seems to be commercially feasible, even though it is an open-source project. Although OpenVZ and Parallels are basically the same (as are VirtualBox and VMWare), it is really difficult to discover where to find the source code. Parallels has an obligation to offer (or contribute to) the source code, but that doesn't mean that they have to do so on Parallels' own website. At least, I can't find such an obligation in the GPL. Nor can I find an obligation to offer the source code under the same name as your commercial product.

There is just one thing I'm wondering about. If your licensing system is part of an open-source project, wouldn't you have to make your licensing system public too? I wonder how Parallels solved that.

--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
Homepage: http://economy-x-talk.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/xtalkprogrammer
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On 18 apr 2011, at 18:53, Peter Brigham MD wrote:
>> 
> 
> I expect that you are right, and I actually don't know all the ins and outs of the licensing schemes, much less have any experience with choosing any of them. I guess I was just responding to the general point. How it plays out in practice I'll defer to you and others who know more.
> 
> -- Peter
> 
> Peter M. Brigham
> pmbrig at gmail.com
> http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig
> 
> "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're
> different."
>                -- Yogi Berra





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