[Info-vax] Thoughts on VSI Community License Program

[Scott Dorsey]

=?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=c3=b8j?=  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>
>Linux is under GPL.

"Linux" is only the Linux kernel, which is licensed under GPL 2.0.

>They can charge whatever they want for software under GPL.
>
>They just need to provide the source code and the recipients
>are allowed to freely distribute the source to the entire
>world.

This is true.

However, the Linux distribution contains a lot of code from a lot of
sources under a lot of different licenses and not all of them are 
licensed under the GPL.  Some are under BSD licenses, some are under
weird licenses of their own.

Most of the commercial distributions like Red Hat contain in addition some
vendor-proprietary code.

If you get the Cray Linux Environment, you get basically SuSe but you
also get a whole bunch of proprietary Cray drivers and applications without
which your Cray hardware won't run.

>That creates a business problem selling GPL software,
>but there is not a legal problem.

The business problem really comes down to "what can we do to this code to
make people want to pay money for it instead of using a free version."  
That's a solved problem, though.

Admittedly back in the nineties there were a lot of outfits whose business
model was to keep getting more and more venture capital while they gave away
products.  This model was not sustainable but most of the companies built on
it are long gone.
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."