[Removed -private] On Wed, Nov 18, 1998 at 06:24:50PM +0100, luther@maxime.u-strasbg.fr wrote: > > I was under the impression that it did, or at least RMS has explained it > > i was not speaking about the GPL¸ like you said they say it. I'd have to look again, but the GPL does not restrict you from putting any price tag on the media you feel is reasonable. Whether or not anyone is willing to pay it is another question. > > that way. The whole point of the GPL is that you can't stop redistribution > > no matter what you sell it for. I can pay $100,000 for a single CD and if > > everything is GPL I can put that CD's contents up on the net freely the same > > day I receive it, free to anyone to download. > > > > The QPL has that same restriction. > > But they don't say it explicitly, we just guess that this is their intention. IANAL so therefore since RMS wrote it, his definition of what it allows is fine by me. If anything, the GPL doesn't say you're allowed to charge for it, which RMS says you are because it's not prohibited. The QPL merely says that you can charge a reasonable fee. Ask any lawyer, "reasonable" is a very WIDE road. > > > the position on Troll Tech on this ? > > > > > > you have me half convinced here, but still i would prefer a clear position in > > > the license, but then this is only a draft ... > > > > You can sell it. Realize that when you buy a Debian CD it was sold to you. > > You're only paying for the media of course, but the GPL software was sold to > > you on that media. You payed to have the stuff distributed to you, not to > > have the right to have the code. And you can't under the GPL or QPL take > > away the ability for someone else to distribute the results as far and wide > > as possible should they choose to do it. > > Yes, but there is this clause : > > 6.a. You make your items available in machine-readable source code form free of > charge to all users of those items. You may charge a reasonable fee for the > physical act of transferring a copy. > > Which say that you have only have to charge a reasonable (small ?) fee. This > mean i cannot charge $10000000 for it ? or does it say it ? > > i think this license is not clear enough, if they mean it, they should say it > without doubts. It means you may charge what is "reasonable". They don't define reasonable. If you want to put a $10000000 price tag on it and call that reasonable, I'm going to disagree but the only thing I can do about it is simply not pay it or wait for someone else to pay it and put the thing on ftp for free. You can not take GPL software and require that anyone distributing it pay you a royalty. That'd not be allowed. However you can charge someone a fee for getting the thing from you. If you're the only place the thing can be gotten from, you're guaranteed to have one sale before your software becomes open access because the one who paid put it up for ftp. <shrug> If your fee is reasonable, you'll sell more than one. If it's not reasonable, one is all you're likely to sell. So the answer to "what is reasonable?" becomes "what are people willing to pay you for it?" because as soon as one does, they can give it away if they want just to spite you. Your best bet if you want to stay in business is to define reasonable the way your users will define it. That goes for both licenses. -- Show me the code or get out of my way.
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