proprietary relicensing & software freedom morality in revenue-generation [LWN.net]

proprietary relicensing & software freedom morality in revenue-generation

Posted Jul 28, 2016 21:19 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
In reply to: proprietary relicensing & software freedom morality in revenue-generation by bkuhn
Parent article: On the boundaries of GPL enforcement

Does anyone have a standardized set of terms for the "selling exceptions" approach (as a preferable alternative to selling a proprietary license)?

I'd love to see some templated terms that effectively say "anyone who meets these conditions may ignore the copyleft terms of the license", with "these conditions" being anything from a one-time fee to a royalty model.

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proprietary relicensing & software freedom morality in revenue-generation

Posted Jul 29, 2016 15:16 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

The only exception I would accept - and actually it's an exception I would like to see - is that you can distribute the binary "as received" provided you point the recipient to where they can get the source.

Okay, if the source disappears then your recipients are up a gum tree, but so are you if you didn't download it ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

proprietary relicensing & software freedom morality in revenue-generation

Posted Jul 29, 2016 16:52 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

>The only exception I would accept - and actually it's an exception I would like to see - is that you can distribute the binary "as received" provided you point the recipient to where they can get the source.

IIRC, the GPLv3 explicitly added this as an option.

proprietary relicensing & software freedom morality in revenue-generation

Posted Jul 29, 2016 18:49 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

I can't find that option in the GPLv3 - there's section 4 referring to verbatim copies of source code, but section 6, which discusses non-source forms, does not appear to have an exception for "as-received".

proprietary relicensing & software freedom morality in revenue-generation

Posted Jul 29, 2016 19:32 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

The way I read 6(d), it sounds like it's okay to distribute unmodified binaries and point people to corresponding source at the upstream project, as long as you take responsibility for preventing dead links.