[split] Opensource license

[roool]

Perhaps you should just do your best and perhaps your tool becomes famous and you'll earn a lot of money .

[DeathProxy]

Do you not know what open source means?
It means that it's free.

[perennate]

Well, there's always donations. And also lots of web-based open source projects get money from hosting. Of course it looks like he doesn't have either of those or ads, so guess not.

[f8ll]

(04-26-2012 08:02 AM)DeathProxy Wrote:  Do you not know what open source means?
It means that it's free.

No it does not. It (depending on the license) means "free as in free speech", not free from cost.
You can still charge for open source software. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html as one example.

[DeathProxy]

D:
If it's open source, can't people just compile it themselves and not have to pay?

[aatish910]

That's why I prefer BSD license.

[perennate]

@f8ll, redistribution of free software can be charged for, but the with the Internet usually it can anyway be downloaded for free. Even if you did charge to download the software, then someone else could easily set up their own free download website for it after paying. Also, don't you have to provide source, free of cost, if you make modifications? Or is there just a limit on the cost or something weird?

@aatish910, the point of copyleft licenses is to protect the free software community. For example, GNU C++ compiler may have been proprietary had companies not had the restriction of the GPL. Also, if companies think that their contributions to the community may be exploited by other companies then they may choose not to release source code or make contributions at all.

[f8ll]

Thread split so this doesn't go too off topic.

(04-26-2012 01:17 PM)DeathProxy Wrote:  D:
If it's open source, can't people just compile it themselves and not have to pay?

Depends on the license. Some licenses will not allow you to redistribute the software or source code, so you'll only be able to get it from the company.

(04-26-2012 01:28 PM)aatish910 Wrote:  That's why I prefer BSD license.

You can still make money with BSD licenses. In fact, its easier since you can write propriety code for it and not require you to submit it back to project or keep it open source. i.e. See Apple and Juniper

(04-26-2012 02:50 PM)perennate Wrote:  @f8ll, redistribution of free software can be charged for, but the with the Internet usually it can anyway be downloaded for free. Even if you did charge to download the software, then someone else could easily set up their own free download website for it after paying. Also, don't you have to provide source, free of cost, if you make modifications? Or is there just a limit on the cost or something weird?

Again, depends on the distribution terms of the license.
Also, whether or not you have to provide the source of modification or if you can redistribute it depends on the license. The GPL requires to submit all modifications, but not all OSS licenses do, i.e. BSD or Apache
Non-Copyleft licenses allow you distribute modifications under a different license even.

[perennate]

Well, a license that doesn't allow source code redistribution isn't free by GNU's definition. So I guess it depends on what you mean by open source too.

[f8ll]

Well that is how they define free software, not Open Source licenses, even then they are pretty strict about the definition of free. i.e. Apple Public Source License isn't a FOSS license in their eyes
Not all open source software is FOSS.