Wine license change

[Sean Farley]

On Wed, 13 Feb 2002 15:00, Steve Langasek wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 13, 2002 at 03:42:07PM -0500, Roger Fujii wrote:
>
> > > The solution as I see it is for GPL/BSD/whatever programmers to
> > > actually cough up something non-technical users not only would
> > > use, but would *prefer*.  *Then* support and selling binaries
> > > becomes a worthwhile proposition.
>
> > you cannot sell *gpl binaries.  You can sell the media, but not the
> > content.  Think sun has a good idea with dual licensing and having
> > assignment of the copyright.  This allows them to change the license
> > so that they can make a productized version.
>
> Since this is not the first time this mistruth show up in the
> discussion here, I think a clarification is warranted.
>
> The second paragraph of section 1 of the GPL (v.2) states:
>
>   You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy,
>   and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for
>   a fee.

This means you may charge someone to transfer the code from you either
via network, CD, floppy, etc at whatever price they are willing to pay.
Remember that the code is "Free" and as such has no true owner to sell
it.

> The only limits that the GPL places on sales is that once someone has
> received a copy of binaries from you, you can't sell them the SOURCE
> at an additional cost that's higher than your distribution cost.  Up
> to that point, you can charge people whatever you want to for access
> to GPLed *content*.  You just don't have any power to make sure that
> others don't sell that same content at a price lower than yours, or
> even give it away.

In other words, you can only sell "access to GPLed *content*".  This is
the same as saying you cannot sell the binaries (and included source)
but can charge for the media (access).

Sean
--------------
scf at farley.org