[Ubuntu-be] [ot] welke licentie? / which license ?

[Jan Claeys]

Op zondag 22-06-2008 om 14:01 uur [tijdzone +0200], schreef Y P:
> / A friend of mine is busy with some projects; herefore he'd like to
> publish something that we may use in the opensource world, but he'd
> like to make derivate or alternate products from it and get some
> financial fee with it:
> which license is the good one, bsd? others?

If he has all the copyright on his application and all the libraries he
uses, then he can use whatever license he wants (that's what TrollTech
does with Qt, for example).

A BSD or similar license makes it possible to sell derivative software,
even if the open source part contains some works copyright by other
people (but remember that the licenses of all linked libraries are
important too).

Another possibility, in case the software lends itself to it, is making
an open source framework that implements a plugin system and the basic
plugins to get something useful, and sell advanced plugins to those who
need it.  E.g. there exist commercial extensions/plugins to the Eclipse
IDE/framework and there are commercial codecs for GStreamer.
(Depending on the license used for the framework itself, you might need
to include some wording that explicitly allows closed source plugins
though.)

More exact suggestions might be possible if we know more or less what
sort of application this is though...


-- 
Jan Claeys