Licensing

[Richard Gaskin]

Peter Haworth wrote:

 > 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.

Only when choosing the GPL option.   As Kevin reminds us, LiveCode is 
different from Drupal, Wordpress, and some other FOSS projects in that 
LC is dual-licensed where those are only available under GPL.

I you have a project where the goals involve sharing and community 
contributions, the GPL can be a good choice.

And if the goals for a project require proprietary terms, with LiveCode 
we have an option for that as well.


 > 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.

Many still do.  Curry Kenworthy, for example, offers a proprietary 
license for his wonderful WordLib library, along with an option to 
obtain a limited license for the source at an additional cost.  His work 
is excellent, and his pricing quite reasonable for companies that may 
need to modify the source for their app.


 > Times change.

Oh they do indeed.  If we look at the TIOBE Top 100 Programming 
Languages, most of them are open source.  And among the relative few 
that have been proprietary, the biggest are now moving to open source 
this year:  Microsoft will be open sourcing their dev tools.

Open source benefits everyone, but most end-users only recognize the 
cost aspect.  For developers, access to the source is where the greatest 
value is derived, allowing open source works to grow and adapt to a 
wider range of use cases than the original developer could do on her own.

The Linux Foundation is a good example of the symbiotic relationship 
between open source and proprietary works:

With servers and routers and phones and tablets and even a few PCs here 
and there, most people use Linux every day and they aren't even aware of it.

And chances are none of that would have been possible if the source had 
been closed. By opening it up, and doing so under a license that ensures 
downstream sharing, Linux is now scalable and adaptable to nearly every 
type of computing device on the planet.

Who pays for all that?  Take a look at the Members list:
<http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members>

Many of those companies earn their money with proprietary software, but 
they rely on open source to provide the tools and infrastructure that 
supports their proprietary development.

One of the many interesting things the GPL has given us is an
opportunity to consider redefinitions of value.

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