On Thu, Jan 14, 1999 at 02:12:44PM -0500, Peter S Galbraith wrote: > I convinced a friend to release his software under a free > license, but he wanted protection in case he later decide to > commercialize a version of his software. I suggested the Qt > license which was at version 0.92 at the time (and still is). The Qt 0.92 license still suffers from the patch clause. While people do consider this `free', we also consider it pretty painful (ie, it seems to rule out CVS trees, it /does/ rule out forking, and so on). Also, because of the patch clause, it isn't GPL compatible. This may or may not matter to you -- it will stop you from using GPLed libraries like libreadline, but it will also stop people from doing a GPL fork (or submitting GPLed patches) which might be what you want. It might be worth your while looking at the Mozilla Public License, which is targetted at a similar situation (an application that people want to be able to make proprietry releases for). It's also available in a boilerplate form so it should be easy to apply to your own software. I think. Check http://www.mozilla.org/NPL/ > Is it [the QPL] considered DFSG-compliant? At the moment, yes. There are questions about whether we'd like to continue considering patch clauses free, however. There's also questions about exactly what final form the QPL will take. > b. When modifications to the Software are released under this > license, a non-exclusive right is granted to the initial developer > of the Software to distribute your modification in future versions > of the Software provided such versions remain available under > these terms in addition to any other license(s). What is the benefit of this for you, btw? For Qt, it lets Troll Tech release a version for money that proprietry people can link to (since proprietry people *can't* link to a QPLed version, in much the same way as they couldn't link to a GPLed version), but since it's only people using your product, how will other license terms than these benefit them? (ie, why would people buy a proprietry version, when they're *guaranteed* they can download a free version by the above clause? Assuming you accept some outside patches, that is) FWIW, HTH, IANAL, etc. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred. ``Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.''
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