GNU GPL can't force payment?

[Tzeng, Nigel H.]

There’s a number of research licenses that aren’t open source but still are source available (or whatever folks wish to call it).

Seems to me that advising using CC BY-NC-SA for ease of understanding and commonality is the best course even if it isn’t a “real” software license.  Whatever is chosen it still has to clear legal and usually the university office of tech transfer but it’s helpful to be able to make the case that license commonality is a desired outcome whatever gets chosen.

Regards,

Nigel


On 12/15/10 8:28 AM, "Cinly Ooi" <cooi at theiet.org> wrote:

Dear DES et al,

"The package is available here for academic research only under the
LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE"

I seen quite a lot of cases where people in academic only wants to apply GPL or LGPL in the 'research community' only so they come out with such a 'cute' license.  Being in an academic environment I had a few discussion where people like GPL and LGPL terms for their  'research community' but not others.

Needless to say they violated FSF's copyright on GPL and LGPL. Normally when you tell them they cannot do that under the GPL and LGPL and they cannot modify the license, they back off and use their own private license.

Sometimes, for  convenience, I know people do informally says to each other  'GPL- (or LGPL-) like terms for research use only'. It is just a short cut to say you may redistribute your program incorporating my code but must publish the source code (or modification of your source code) and only for research use only.

However, this is the first time I see such license being publicly advertised.

Nonetheless, most of the time I think people will respect their wishes. Me personally will avoid them if I could. I don't like the violation of FSF's copyright.

Best regards
Cinly


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