IPL as a burden

[Angelo Schneider]

Manfred Schmid wrote:
> 
Hi all!

[...]
> 
> "When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.
> Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the
> freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this
> service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you
> want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new
> free programs; and that you know you can do these things."
> 
> GNU reads
> 
> "`Free software'' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the
> concept, you should think of ``free speech'', not ``free beer.''
> 
> ``Free software'' refers to the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute,
> study, change and improve the software."
> 
> To me, a lot of the discussion gets down to the "free beer" question.
> May I ask the Board for an official statement: Is the charging of
> license fees (or execution fees) definitely a no-go to qualify it as
> OSI-compliant Open Source?
> 
> Up to now, I did not find any such statement on opensource.org
> 
> Manfred

Nope, taking fees is no problem either for open source nor for GPL.
The problem is: you can not take fees from customer A and waive thme
from customer B.
You can not say: customer A may redistribute/modify sources and pay a
fee to you and customer B may NOT modify it.

OSI simply says: ALL CUSTOMERS ARE EQUAL.

If your license does not meet that criteria it is not OSI/open source.

Angelo

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