Disallowing distribution of binaries

[David Johnson]

On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Bjorn Andersson wrote:
> Our company is going to develop a product that will be available on
> multiple platforms. We believe in the benefits of open source software,
> and want to put our software under an open source license.
> However, to ensure a revenue from our effort, we would like to add
> an additional restriction to the GNU GPL license: to disallow
> distribution of the software in *compiled* form on non-open
> source operating systems. Unfortunately this is not compliant
> with the Open Source Definition (v1.7, section 2).

One must ask why you wish to "discriminate" against those not using
your approved operating systems. You are treating one class of users
differently than another, based solely on their use of tools. 

In terms of my philosophy (and not that of the OSS or even the
FSF), Open and Free software means that the user has complete
permission to give a copy of the software to his or her friends,
enemies, coworkers, etc. It shouldn't matter whether the software is
source code or binary. If Windows or Sun users cannot distribute
binaries, then the software can't be either Open Source or Free
Software.

I'm not sure what kind of software it is, but if you look at
Trolltech, they have been very successful with an Open Source product
for Unix and a proprietary and greater revenue producing product for
Windows. There is nothing stopping anyone from porting the Unix version
to Windows, yet no one has done it. Maybe this model can work for you.
Distribute an OSS version for Unix and a proprietary version for
Windows. There are other revenue models available, but it all depends
on the nature of your software.

-- 
David Johnson
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