Trying to make economic sense of open sourcing livecode

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Fri Feb 1 19:59:11 EST 2013


Glen Bojsza wrote:
>>
>> Nothing in the GPL would prevent anyone from *writing* such a feature, but since the GPL requires that all source code under it be available that would prevent them from ever *using* it. ;)
>
> So given Kevin has said the stack protection code will be under GPL will you stop using it?

If I were to release software governed by the GPL and refuse to make the 
source available, I would be in violation of the license.

The GNU Public license is designed to grant what the Free Software 
Foundation calls The Four Freedoms (and since most of their work was 
written in C, the numbering begins at zero as a sort of geek joke):

- Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.

- Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change
   it to make it do what you wish.

- Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your
   neighbor.

- Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your
   improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public,
   so that the whole community benefits.

If these fit the goals you want to serve with a software project, the 
GPL is a good choice.  Making the source code available is necessary to 
fulfill those goals.

If you want to serve any other goals, RunRev's dual-licensing provides 
the option of a proprietary license too, same as with MySQL and the many 
other projects that use it.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  Follow me on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys




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