Commercial Licensing

[Graham Samuel]

Hi all - this may be naive, but I don’t recall a recent discussion on this list and I don’t know where to turn.

The recent discussion on licensing centering round the GPL and the different editions of LC is interesting, but I rather want to extend it to get some advice about simple commercial licensing.

All the software I’ve ever written for sale to date has been published by a separate publisher: I have retained the copyright and received royalties, so I have not worried overmuch about the terms and conditions which the ultimate users have to sign up to. That and the fact that my publishers are very very old friends, so there is a very high level of trust between us, means that my own contractual position has never worried me.

Now however I’m looking at a different situation, which is publishing something on my own account. The ‘something’ is potentially a number of programs (OK, apps if you must) made with LC Commercial versions, for which I expect to be paid. I also have a situation where I am the developer, not the copyright owner, and where the copyright owner has the same sort of ambition to sell his product in the open market. We are both clueless about what kind of license agreement to include in our products. We could both be using the same contract (since I’m trying to advise him) except that I’m based in the UK (or at any rate the European Union) and he’s based in the US. In both cases, what is needed is as simple a contract as possible which provides a very limited warranty, bans unreasonable copying and denies all forms of consequential liability.

It seems to me that there must be pro-forma contracts out there, applicable to sole traders (this is UK term, not sure what it would be in the US), but I don’t know how to find them. Furthermore I notice that several active contributors to this list sell the products through a company, and not as individuals. In the UK, AFAIK, there is no particular reason not to simply sell as an individual, always provided one can limit one’s liability through a contract. In the US, it may be different.

Is anyone out there willing to discuss this and maybe discuss the steps they went through, the decisions they made, and how they got the wording of their license terms?

TIA for any further info

Graham