I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that if you use an application that is distributed under a GNU license in your application and want to distribute that derived application, then your application must also be distributed under a GNU license with source code, copyleft.
However, if your application only "hooks into" another application then you can create a copyrighted, proprietary, fee based application. The difference between "hooks into" vs "derived" has a lot of undefined uncertainty.
Christie Mason
Christie Mason
Posts made by Christie Mason
There may not be upfront fees but there's a huge cost in time. Time to install (many times it takes time just to find the install instructions and specs), time to find documentation, time to search through discussion forums, or time post and wait for a reply, time to update and update and update.
If you customize then there's also time to test each update to make sure it doesn't break your customizations. This is necessary with commercial software also but the mixed blessing of OSS is that updates occur more frequently and w/o documentation of what core functions are being updated.
Christie Mason
If you customize then there's also time to test each update to make sure it doesn't break your customizations. This is necessary with commercial software also but the mixed blessing of OSS is that updates occur more frequently and w/o documentation of what core functions are being updated.
Christie Mason
I don't think Drupal/Moodle/etc users would abandon Drupal/Moodle/etc if it charged something like $35.00. That sense of community can be a very powerful incentive for paying to stay in the community.
I think in many ways I would be more comfortable if free open-source projects charged some type of fee. Perhaps I'm just old and cynical, but I suspect there'd be less abandoning of OSS projects if there were some $ to be made. Creating a community, being recognized by your peers, other non-monetary motivators; can go along way to "pay" for involvement but there comes a point where the mortgage needs to be paid and families need to be fed.
Christie Mason
I think in many ways I would be more comfortable if free open-source projects charged some type of fee. Perhaps I'm just old and cynical, but I suspect there'd be less abandoning of OSS projects if there were some $ to be made. Creating a community, being recognized by your peers, other non-monetary motivators; can go along way to "pay" for involvement but there comes a point where the mortgage needs to be paid and families need to be fed.
Christie Mason
Another benefit of open source is that it provides a hub for fee based spokes of services. I see a lot of fee based training, documentation, add-ons, customizations around the most popular open source projects.
That could become a negative if the OSS project team is also involved in developing fee based services because of the tempation to reduce free functionality as a way to potatoe chip people into using fee based services/products, similar to how fee based applications offer a "free" limited feature version to hook you into their fee based version.
Christie Mason
That could become a negative if the OSS project team is also involved in developing fee based services because of the tempation to reduce free functionality as a way to potatoe chip people into using fee based services/products, similar to how fee based applications offer a "free" limited feature version to hook you into their fee based version.
Christie Mason