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Software w/ Source for Sale?
frambooz asks: "As the GNU public license (amongst others) describes, you can make software that is free (as in freedom), but you don't have to make it *free* (as in free beer). I'm wondering if industry officials are aware of this fact, however. Do you know of any software packages that are Open Source, but still require you to purchase them? Did you ever work on such a project as a programmer yourself? If so, how did the development differ from a free(dom)/free(beer) Open Source application?"
You must buy the enterprise versions of Redhat, and you get the source, but not the source to some of their proprietary stuff.. ..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
The earliest example of selling free software is probably RMS selling tapes of GNU Emacs for $150 a tape. He says he sold 8-10 tapes a month which generated enough cash for him to live off.
"Madness is something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule." -- Nietzsche
Yeah, I think the poster of the original article is not clear on the term "open source" that he uses. He indicates this in wondering if "industry officials" are aware that they can charge for open source stuff per the GPL. He is probably thinking of what I would call "source included". That would not be under an open redistribution license, as the GPL is. Most companies would not go for that because there's no way to make people buy it anymore.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
Rogue Wave Software always used to ship source. I assume they still do.
See you, space cowboy...
The Kylix trick is inherently flawed and probably contradicts the GPL IMHO.
No, there's nothing wrong with it. You can't really build a Kylix app without using Borland libraries, so your app will include Borland code, making your code a derived work of theirs. If you don't have a license to distribute their code you can't distribute your app. Since they release their libraries under the GPL, you can release your app under the GPL, if you like. If you want to release under some other license, you have to pay Borland for a different license for their stuff.
Other software packages like Qt for X11, Sleepycat's dbm implementation, etc., work the same way. It's a pretty nice model for development tools, although it wouldn't work for most other kinds of software.
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I think that you may mean patents here.
Patents and copyrights both arise from this same underlying theory, and the same bit of the US Constitution. There are differences in the legal implementation because it makes sense to strike a different balance between the public and private interests for mechanisms than it does for expressions.
The reason copyright law has never explicitly required publication (unlike patents) is that without publication there was no way the author could commercially exploit his/her work, so there was no need to make that part of it explicit. The monopoly was intended to provide a measure of control to people who wanted to publish, since the nature of expressive works (writings, music, etc.) is such that once the material is published the creator loses all control of it, absent legal protections. Then software came along and it made sense to publish binaries and keep the source secret. One of the key assumptions made by the copyright laws -- but not the theory under the laws -- was invalidated by new technology.
In fact there *was* a sort of publication requirement to copyright law up until 1976: To gain protection you had to register your copyright and to register you had to file a copy of your work with the Copyright Office, who made available to everyone via the Library of Congress. That is actually still true except that as of 1976 you only have to register if you're going to litigate and you only have to file the first few pages and last few pages of any long work. The changes were primarily made to keep the Copyright Office from being buried in the ever-increasing flow of copyrighted material, but a side effect was that it made it possible to obtain copyright protection for something that is not published at all.
And, of course, something that is never published will never fall into the public domain, so why should the public protect it the author's monopoly on it? The author has kept it secret, so the author should just maintain control that way. Trade secret law even provides some enforcement tools.
Patents always explicitly required publication, because it was always possible to use/sell a mechanism without publishing it.
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So you think Patents and copyrights are USA inventions then? Bloody arrogant yanks. From the constitution !!??? arrrgh!
Of course not. But I was talking about US law. Sorry for the America-centrism, but slashdot *is* an unabashedly American web site, even if there are visitors from all over.
But, to give credit where credit is due, copyrights were actually invented by the British primarily as a means of censorship. This type of copyright started out as sort of an agreement about publisher's rights (publishers owned what they printed, not authors) and was formalized in the Licensing Act in the mid 1600's (sorry, don't remember the year off the top of my head) which gave a monopoly on all printing to the Stationers' Company of London. In exchange for this monopoly, the Company agreed not to publish anything the Crown didn't like.
The first modern copyright law, which attempts to promote authorship, also originated from the UK, in the form of the Statue of Anne, passed in 1709. It gave copyrights to authors and established the term of 28 years, which the young United States adopted nearly 100 years later.
The origin of the the basic structure of the copyright law in effect in the US and around the world today was defined in the Berne Convention in the late 1800s. The Berne Convention established copyrights that are automatic, without the need for registration, and last the life of the author plus 50 years. The US didn't fully adopt this approach to copyright law until 1976 and 1998.
All of that said, in the US, the power of Congress to establish copyright laws arises from a specific passage of the US Constitution. Further, the philosophy underlying US copyright law was, for nearly two hundred years, really defined by a series of letters between Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who defined the basic social contract that US copyright law has been based upon. This American view of copyright had subtle but important differences from the British and European views, based on the relative importance early Americans placed on freedom of speech and action. The American view of copyright was much more skeptical of the value of granting monopolies. Was. No more, unfortunately.
Now, should I close with some snide comment about knee-jerking Limeys? Nahhh.
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