Re: lprng license

[Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl>]

Ben Pfaff wrote:
> Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl> writes:
>    No, it's strange.  "under the GNU software license for non-commercial use".
>    No such license exists.
> 
> I think you're obfuscating the meaning of that phrase.  To me, it is
> clear that he means that you can use the GNU GPL if you don't need to
> incorporate LPRng into a commercial product.

I'm not the one obfuscating it :-)  As I said, the license is strange.

However, "commercial use" is quite different from "incorporate into a
commercial product".  We're talking about a printer daemon here, not a
parser generator.  The obvious way to use it is to run the thing.

You can indeed put the parentheses differently:

For non-commercial use, LPRng is distributed under the GNU software license.
For limited commercial use, LPRng is distributed under the Artistic License.
Commercial support and licensing is available through Patrick Powell.

That doesn't make sense to me, and it still does not allow commercial use.

>    In any case, the text makes clear that commercial use is limited.
>    This is not free.
> 
> The GNU GPL does limit commercial use--you can't incorporate GPL'd
> code into your commercial product if you aren't going to distribute
> source code and the right to redistribute.  This is, IMO, what the
> author is referring to.

You can't incorporate GPL'd code into *anything* if you are going to
distribute binaries without sources.  But it freely allows use,
commercial or otherwise.

Richard Braakman