Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
Monday, November 27, 2006, 1:46:34 AM, you wrote:
I hate to be nitpicking but GPL is not only compatible with but encourages commerce in general and commercial software in particular. It is incompatible with proprietary software. There's a difference.
of course, but on practice most of commercial software are closed-source. i personally use this license when i want to show code to the world but don't want that but will be used in commercial software (without paying royalties).
This is impossible. GPL expressly allows commercial use of your software. You cannot license under GPL and at the same time disallow making money out of it, this would be incompatible. If, however, you actually meant to say 'proprietary', then I would kindly ask you to say so. Imprecise usage of the term 'commercial' as a synonym (**) for 'proprietary' only serves to promote common misconceptions. It is neither in the spirit nor the words of the GPL to be opposed to commerce (=earning money by selling work or things of value to others), and there is ample proof(*) that it isn't opposed to commerce in practice, too. And no, I don't intend to pursue this (somewhat off-) topic any further ;-) Cheers Ben (*) anyone know how much Novell paid for buying SuSE? Not that it's gotten any better since... (**) some would say 'euphemism'