Re: [LAD] [OT] LinuxSampler and GPL - some clarifications

On Jan 28, 2008 4:11 PM, Paul Davis <paul(a)linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote: "You may charge for physical act of transferring a copy": 1. the GPL allows both commercial or non-commercial(costs only) charge (since there's no limit as to what price you may charge). 2. the GPL only allows to charge for tranfering a copy or *distribution* of copies Which means it also deals with *commercial* distribution and since the GPL deals with virtually any aspect of distribution, *including* commercial distribution, it is *NOT* outside of its scope. The same goes for commercial copying and commercial modifying. And guess what, the GPL doesn't allow it for third parties, though not explicitly. Because you cannot apply "Qui tacet, consentire videtur" unless you're dealing with roman law. So let's rephrase the statement: Activities other than copying, distribution and modification ... whether or not a third party is charging for such copying, distribution, or modification in order to make profit or cover the costs for doing so. Paul, this is the General Public License, not General Public Labour. And in fact, you' might be the one working your as* off in order to fuel profit of others. And they might not give back. If someone rips of parts of ardour in order to build a 24 track hw recording machine (for example) he won't even bother to release the parts. What will you do? Sue him? Time and money consuming, what do you get as a poor opensource developer? In the meantime suppose he's making loads of money, his hw recorder is a big success. Then after dozens of C&D letters he decides to release the parts on his website and says, he's commited to opensource. After that he sells his company for big amount of money. What do you get? Making money out of GPL licensed software for the copyright holders can be important, sometimes essential in order to keep the project from dying, investing in its development, rectruiting more developers, speeding up the development making it more robust, less error prone, more feature rich etc.... I mean, demonstrations all over the world, people holding their hands, balloons all over the place, tons of petitions signed. Seriously though, give me at least 10 links. There's a deeper problem with the fact how people understand the GPL. Many developers have considered switching from it for the reasons were discussing(protecting from commercial misuse). As far as i know you have considered that too if i'm not mistaken, along with Christian(LinuxSampler). If people interpreting the GPL in the woodstock sense of way, will eventually stop doing it, and start looking for solutions in order to squeeze some revenue out of their open source work, they will eventually start seeking for a different license. And that might have deep consequences. Every single developer can choose another license, seek legal advice in order to do so, or in order to write a new one, etc. With the GPL, you don't have to deal with such things, since it's a defacto standard. Meaning the number of licenses for which you need a legal intepretation is equal to 1, you can have a look at the cases where the license has been defended in court, almost no need to seek legal advice in order to protect certain rights(if you you contect FSF), no need for third parties to seek legal advice every time they pick another open source software, i.e. rules get more understandable, don't change often, better for everyone. If a company makes profit with opensource software as a *third party*, and is required to invest part of its profit into development of the opensource product, either by paying or by coding, how much does such fact make the software less free? What? Demostrate. Again, the intent of the GPL is *your* intent, not the one of FSF - declaration of will. You're talking about distribution, under the terms of GPL. You can charge for distribution of software licensed under the terms of GPL, not *for software* licensed under the terms of GPL. Marek