Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote:
Free Software is also commercial! You can use Free Software to gain money
even if you release your program under the GPL.
You can sell one copy - but you can't prevent that customer from giving
away copies to everyone else. Or you can give the program away yourself
and sell support.
You can charge for as many copies as you want, as much as you can charge it
for. You can also charge 0.
And so can anyone else, once you have released your first copy, so it is
likely that you'll be competing against someone charging 0.
In any of the cases, you can also charge for support.
Good programs don't need much support - and who is going to buy a bad one?
If you use libraries (like the MySQL client) covered by the GPL and
distribute the program, the entire work must be under GPL terms -
although I think an earlier message had a link to an exception for MySql
for some other open source license terms.
But you do not merely "use" libraries, you include them in the program.
That's why :)
In most cases, the end user supplies his own copy of the library, which
he obtained as a standard component of his OS distribtution, so I think
the whole concept is on pretty shaky legal ground. But, I wouldn't want
to be the one paying the court costs to sort it out. And in the case of
MySql there's not much reason to, since PostgresSQL is arguably a better
database without any of the restrictions. Even better, use ODBC, perl
DBI, or a similar database independent interface and let the end user
choose his own database so there can be no claim that you have created a
derived work.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
