Summary of ShareWare experiences (Moderately long).

[Joe Buck]

In article <2816 at cod.NOSC.MIL>, burkley at cod.NOSC.MIL (V. Joe Burkley) writes:
|> "    I'm sure lots of people will suggest you use the GNU license terms.
|> Under this license, the Free Software Foundation allows anyone to use the
|> software as one wishes.  However, if one intends to distribute the
|> software or any new software which depends upon the original package,
|> one may not make a profit.  In other words, use GNU software and your
|> software is free if you want to let anyone else have it.  The GNU license
|> is getting pretty popular, even with people not associated with the FSF."

This is false.  FSF doesn't care if you make a profit, and many people
are making a profit by distributing or supporting Gnu software (Young
Minds will sell you all the FSF software on a CD-ROM and they make a
profit on it; Cygnus Support, founded by Michael Tiemann, author of g++,
makes money by supporting Gnu and other freely redistributable software).
The important phrase is "freely redistributable" -- you cannot prevent
anyone from freely redistributing FSF or FSF-derived software.  You may
charge for the service of distributing the software, and you can make
a profit.  "Free" in FSF does not mean "no money".  It means "freely
redistributable" -- though some opponents of FSF think they abuse the
language with their interpretation of what that means, I'm done arguing
about it.

Followups to gnu.misc.discuss.

--
Joe Buck
jbuck at galileo.berkeley.edu	 {uunet,ucbvax}!galileo.berkeley.edu!jbuck