Rev/Livecode project and GPL Licenses

[Richard Gaskin]

Mark Schonewille wrote:

 > 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.

My copy of the "End User License Agreement For Parallels (R) Desktop" 
included with v6.0 reads like a standard proprietary license and the 
word "GNU" doesn't appear anywhere in it.

Are you sure it's GPL?

Always eager for a bargain and comfortable with make files, I searched 
Google for "Parallels open source", and was able to turn up only a 
reference to an APS cloud service and this row from 2007:


   Parallels annoys open-source faithful over code release

   Parallels Inc. has released the source code for the Wine software
   used by Parallels Desktop 3.0 on Monday -- but only after weeks of
   prodding by Wine developers and negative publicity on the Slashdot
   and Digg IT forums.

<http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9026139/Parallels_annoys_open_source_faithful_over_code_release>


As far as I can tell, it's only a relatively small part of the Parallels 
product that's open source, a derivative of WINE used for graphics 
acceleration, which is covered under the LGPL so it's a bit more lenient 
than GPL (though not so lenient that it avoided annoying the FOSS 
community when the mods weren't made available <g>).

Even though I do most of my VM work with VirtualBox these days, I'd love 
to be wrong on this.  If you have anything showing Parallels switching 
to GPL it would be very good to know.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  LiveCode Journal blog: http://LiveCodejournal.com/blog.irv