Choosing the right license

[Philipp Guehring]

Am Don, 02 Nov 2000 schrieben Sie:
> On Thu, Nov 02, 2000 at 11:02:59AM +0000, David Johnson wrote:
> > 
> > If the license forbids charging customers for any service that is theirs to 
> > provide then it will have a very tough time being approped as either OSS or 
> > FS. To translate your wishes another way, you want "to make it difficult for 
> > Redhat to include your software on its distribution".
> 
> That's not the goal. What I want to do is to make it unpalatable for
[...]

> Any ideas?

I would go it another way.
Do not make it difficult to want money for a service. Make it difficult to take
the users their rights to the data away.

I would put it under the GPL, and include as many possibilities for the users
to get their data out of the system if they want it. Create the interfaces for
the user that they can download all the data, and use it on their own computer.
Please do not forbid the hosting of it on an ASP, because I think ASP´s are
somehow the future for several kinds of applications. And I do not think that
you have the environment to be the ASP for all those people. Well, just as
Redhat is currently providing the things on media and for download, I guess
that there will be companies who will provide ASPs, on a similar open strategy.
But they will just use your component, and so I guess that it´s on you to
include the interfaces for the customer to download the data, because the ASP
will not do it in a special way. On the other side, I guess that all the
different applications will have different file formats (XML based, or not), so
it will be on every application on its own to provide those data interfaces.

I think selling software is not necessarily evil, so do not forbid selling.
The GPL for instance explicitly says that anyone can sell GPL software, and it
is a GOOD thing to do that. Simply because having it under the GPL somehow
automatically creates a somehow fair market, I guess. (Simply because everyone
can have it for free, so you really have to deliver something worth the price)


-- 
~ Philipp Gühring              p.guehring at poboxes.com
~ http://www.futureware.at/       ICQ UIN: 6588261
~ "Hat du Abkürzungen, mut du *Quick nehmen!"