Re: Debian Package for Phylip
The GPL does allow any company to take GPL'ed code and make a commercial
product derived from it. Note that I said commercial product, not
proprietary. To respect the license, they would have to distribute the
source code of their derived products along with any binary they sell, and
they would have to use the GPL again. So yeah, they could try to sell it
for a hundred dollars, but the first buyers could then redistribute freely
under the GPL. This removes the incentive of over-charging.
As for a company taking GPL code and building a web interfcae out of it and
charging $1000 for each access, I guess this is possible since they aren't
redistributing code, but rather providing a service. But if the overhead
of building their web interface is not worth $1000 (or even $1) a shot per
clients to use, the market will tell them so. A competitor will do the
same for less.
Hopes this helps. I am not a lawyer.
Peter
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