Re: WTEST license conditions
It seems like it's possible to achieve your objectives without preventing
Debian and other Linux distributions from including your program by making a
few changes in how you ask commercial users to pay:
> My original intention of charging commercial users is to:
> - recover the cost of web based distribution. This is perfectly legal
> according to GPL and I don't think there will be much disagreement on this
> one.
You can require commercial users to post a credit card payment or send you a
negotiable instrument before allowing them to download the software from
your web site. It is probably not neccessary to include this as requirement
in the software license, and doing so will render it incompatible with other
GPL'd software.
The advantages of retaining GPL compatibly are many: It allows you to
incorporate useful code from a huge collection of other GPL'd software into
your software with no licensing fee. It also allows you and your customers
to link WTEST with GPL'd libraries, and again, no royaly payments would be
required.
> - provide additional service, training and enterprise level tools that are
> beoynd the scope of the basic WTEST release. GPL does not cover services
> and enterprise level tools will not be released under GPL.
Perhaps a copyright notice like the following would help make users
available of additional services you're selling:
# Copyright (C) 1999 Bibhas Bhattacharya <bibhas@interlog.com>
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# If you wish to purchase a warranty, support, or consulting services
# for this software, you may contact contact Bibhas Bhattacharya
# <bibhas@interlog.com> for more information.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
# Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
You might also add:
# It is recommended that commercial users of this software purchase their
# copy from http://www.wtest-website.com/. Paid users recieve...
# Additional tools such as... are available from this site for a fee.
Large corporations have tons of money to spend. I've seen firsthand a
certain large corporation purchase support contracts and paid downloads for
even the most miscellary pieces of software. A tool as useful as WTEST
should have no problem getting a few bucks from those with deep pockets so
long as you make it clear how they go about paying and easy for them to do
so.
--
Brian Ristuccia
brianr@osiris.978.org
bristucc@nortelnetworks.com
bristucc@cs.uml.edu
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