It's incompatible with the GPL

Andy Tai lichengtai at yahoo.com
Mon May 6 23:40:17 UTC 2002


--- Akil Franklin <afranklin at techMilestone.com> wrote:
> But we must remember that the
> intent of the GNU
> license is to "license" totally free software for
> the creation of other
> totally free software. In other words, this license
> is not commercially
> viable.
> 
These have been repeated 1000 times by many people,
but what the hack?
"free" means "libre", not "no cost", so you can have
commercial GPL software

> It seems to me that it is impossible to have a
> license that is
> "compatible" with the GNU GPL given clause 6 of the
> GPL:
> 

X11 and "new" BSD are compatible with the GPL ( an
one-way street)

> 
> This clause would seem to make the GNU license
> incompatible with all
> other licenses... as it should be. Its strength is
> its clear intent to
> ensure that all users play by their rules of free
> software-- and their
> rules only. Unfortunately however, these rules make
> commercial viability
> for GNU-licensed software an impossibility.
> 
> We could always release the software
> under the GNU
> license... but then no one would use it for a
> commercial purpose. 
> 

By being GPL incompatible, you lose a lot of potential
users, which may matter or not matter to you.  You can
support both "commercial" and GPL users with the X11
license.  Or you can dual license, etc...
 
> -- Akil


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