On Wed, May 21, 2003 at 02:51:05PM -0500, Dave Sherohman wrote: > On Wed, May 21, 2003 at 10:26:58AM -0700, Bill Moseley wrote: > > Specifically, this is for swish-e, which is a search engine. The swish-e source is built > > into a C library, and also into a binary program "swish-e" that is a small front-end to the > > library. Currently it's all GPL. > > > > People have been asking for different licensing -- I guess they want to include a search > > engine in their proprietary products. For some it's just a matter of providing a search to > > their included documentation. For others it's perhaps more integrated with their product. > > Provided that you own the copyright on swish-e (i.e., you either > wrote it entirely yourself or had all other contributors assign the > copyright on their contributions to you), you can offer it to these > people under other license terms if you wish without affecting the > license status of the freely-available GPL version of the code. Just to explicitly state what you're getting at: You, the copyright holder, can license your code to anyone, under any license you like. This does *not* affect the Free, existing license at all; it just offers people another way to make use of it. You can make them pay you in exchange for the right to include your code in their proprietary software. Some people use this as a way to make money from their software, while allowing the Free code to continue to develop. Trolltech does exactly this with their Qt graphics toolkit. Note that the situation is considerably more complex if other people have contributed to it, since they have to agree to this new license, too. -- Rob Weir <rweir@ertius.org> | mlspam@ertius.org | http://www.ertius.org/ GPG keys: 1024D/1E73B7CD, 4096R/3ABDE5EC | Do I look like I want a CC? Words of the day: Khaddafi NSA Project Monarch Ortega bomb ANC
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