Dave, Dave, Dave… There seems to be some confusion. Licenses are like women, they are beautiful, but very hard to understand… Many men have tried, many men have failed…
In a recent podcast, Dave stared that his new software would be GPL and that you could do what you wanted with it, but that “you’re not free to make it commercial, because it’s GPL.”
The GNU General Public License does not restrict software to being non-commercial!
So I present to you today’s reading, courtesy of Richard Stallman and gnu.org. Follow these links, do the reading, and then come back and tell me that the GPL restricts you from using code in commercial software.
- IP: The GPL and commercial development
- Categories of Free and Non-Free Software
- Some Confusing or Loaded Words and Phrases that are Worth Avoiding
Here’s a bit more reading: Open Source Licensing. Choose a license that does what you want it to do, and make sure it does what you think it does…