Licensing

[Richard Gaskin]

Kay C Lan wrote:

 > On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 1:26 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
 >
 >> It is indeed confusing...
 >>
 >> But whether it's "detrimental" is a matter of taste.
 >
 > If Peter finally decides NOT to make his lcStackBrowser available
 > to LC Community Edition Users due to confusion and concern as to
 > whether the GPL applies then that would be a loss to the Community
 > Users and a few less sales for Peter.

That would be the case if the only version of LiveCode were the 
GPL-governed Community Edition.

Peter has a license for the Commercial Edition, as do most of the pro 
developers likely to spend money on tools.

The Commercial Edition still exists, and as such nothing has changed there.

Now we have an addition to the mix, the newer Community Edition. If any 
aspect of distributing to that new audience causes concern about that 
specific deployment, it doesn't change what can be done with the 
Commercial Edition we've been enjoying for decades.


My own personal opinion is that when using other people's code it's 
useful to err on the side of a conservative interpretation until the 
copyright holder says otherwise.

And here that's what happened: I'd cc'd Kevin with some of this thread 
and this morning he explicitly stated here that he sees no copyright 
infringement with regard to IDE tools made with the Commercial Edition 
distributed to users of the Community Edition:
<http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2015-January/209927.html>

As with so many things in life, it rarely hurts to ask.  At worst you'll 
know the boundaries of what can and cannot be done, and at best you may 
get exactly what you want.


As the copyright holder Kevin's opinion is the most relevant, defining 
for us what can be done with his company's intellectual property.

It's worth noting, though, that his intentions are more liberal than 
that of the respective counsels for the Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal 
projects, in which their argument is that merely making calls to their 
APIs and sharing execution memory space is enough to satisfy the 
definition of "derivative work".

Personally I prefer Kevin's view, and in my reading it's more sensible 
than that of Drupal/Wordpress/Joomla.  But since I'm not the copyright 
holder for LiveCode or Drupal/Joomla/Wordpress my personal preference is 
irrelevant; I've been unable to persuade anyone in the Wordpress project 
to adopt my personal preferences. :)

Given the many and ever-growing ways code can co-mingle during 
execution, we may never see a concise legally binding definition of 
"derivative work".  So for myself, I like to check with the copyright 
holder.


 > And as you point out yourself, a healthy libraries, plug-ins and
 > widgets environment is good not just for users but for Runrev
 > as well.

I wrote that in support of Simon's observation that many of the add-ons 
for Wordpress are indeed financially viable for their developers, even 
though that project explicitly considers all of them to be "derivative 
works" which inherit the rights and responsibilities of the GPL.

As a distribution license, the GPL expresses no opinion about price. 
GPL-governed works can be sold, and the requirement is that when the 
sale is made the source is made available to the recipient of the 
executable code.

In practical terms this often means reduced sales, since of course the 
recipient of a GPL-governed work has the explicit freedom to 
redistribute the work.

But as Simon noted, this is not necessarily a death knell for sales when 
a tool is sufficiently useful and the community it serves is 
sufficiently supportive.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com