Rui Miguel Silva Seabra: >> You can charge for as many copies as you want, as much as you can charge it >> for. You can also charge 0. Les Mikesell: > 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. Though, I can't imagine too many providing support for free. I'd expect competitors competing on the "free" market to be quite different than the others. >> 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? Is that a rhetorical question? Millions of Microsoft software users, perhaps? ;-) It's long been said that one reason that different releases of some software are so radically different from the prior one, and that the provided documentation is so hopeless, is that it's because the company wants to make their money from running training courses. >> But you do not merely "use" libraries, you include them in the program. > 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. This is the bit, about the computing industry, that I just find incredibly weird: A strange use of the term derived. Yes, if you took someone else's coding and put it *into* your coding, or put in the essence of how it did its job even if a bit modified, your work is "derived" from it. No, if your work communicates with someone else's program, it's not "derived" from it. My chair is not "derived" from a screwdriver, even if one was used to put it together. Nor is it derived from a table, even chairs and tables are sold together. If you copied someone else's file, and put it into a package with your own program, that's not "derived," either. That's a copying issue. -- (This box runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
