On 2007-05-18, 00:38 GMT, Les wrote: > If someone (like me) creates some whooptidoo program that does > something wonderful, can he/she sell that program commercially? Yes, of course, you can sell commerically whatever you create (after all, take a look at my email address -- yes, there is some commerical software we are selling for exceptional purposes). RMS position on this is <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html>. ``Free'' as in freedom (as distinguished from free as ``free beer'') has nothing to do with paying price. There are two caveats though (of course this is not complete analysis of GPL, for that consult your lawyer): a) if you use any GPL-covered source code in your software (of if otherwise required by the licenses of the libraries you link against, etc.), you have to make your source code available as well, b) whole stuff about patents (quite interesting right now, but it would take too long to explain in one email). There are many companies which are able to sell software with these limitations (see for example theKompany http://www.thekompany.com/home/ as just one example which came to my mind). And of course, if you use non-GPL free software (again take a look at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html to understand these distinctions), you may be not bound to release software -- take a look at EnterpriseDB <http://www.enterprisedb.com/>, the guys there are extending PostgreSQL <http://www.postgresql.org/> to make it more compatible with OracleDB and they are selling it for money. This is one of the few situations, where I feel a duty to add, that nothing in this email has anything to do with opinions of my employer, I have no clue how good service these companies provide, and I am not a lawyer anymore, so nothing here constitutes legal advice. Best, Matej
