Licensing

[Peter Haworth]

Thanks to everyone for the explanations.  Especially Kevin since he's the
one with the final say!

I'm now back to feeling relatively comfortable with moving forward on this.

I do find it somewhat ironic that back in my working life, the company I
worked for charged a substantial amount of money to provide the source code
for any of our products and now I'm faced with doing it at no charge.

In fact, I remember discussions on the list before the Community Edition
days about the need for tools developers to provide an option to purchase
the source code so the tools users felt comfortable in being able to
support the products they developed with them.  Times change.

Pete
lcSQL Software <http://www.lcsql.com>
Home of lcStackBrowser <http://www.lcsql.com/lcstackbrowser.html> and
SQLiteAdmin <http://www.lcsql.com/sqliteadmin.html>

On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 7:34 AM, Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com>
wrote:

> 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
>
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