Your thinking is off, the GPL and derived licenses like the AGPL are viral on purpose. They apply to everybody who uses, downloads, or accesses the software (in the case of the AGPL) and they are explicit about this:
Each time you convey a covered work, the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensors, to run, modify and propagate that work, subject to this License.
what i’m reading from that is that both parties must agree that the work has been conveyed. with the risk of going all sovcit, if the conveyed item is a binary, and the producer does not send the source code to the consumer as instructed by the license, can the consumer really pull the source and distribute it? surely if the license is broken the work falls back on default permissions, e.g. all rights reserved?
In the general case, the person or persons who distributed the binary would then have done so illegally. In order to distribute, you have to follow the terms of the license. So them attempting to go after anyone downstream of them at that point is sort of like calling the police because someone stole your drug stash. And if there’s an upstream beyond the illegal distributors, they’re practically waving a “Sue me now!” placard in their direction.
The originator of the code, above whom there is no upstream, is allowed to offer it under more than one license (including a mixture of free and closed licenses), but the specific license in force has to be specified with each distributed copy.
The first one that comes to mind is Qt (the widget toolkit). While I’m not sure the current owners still do this, Trolltech offered the earlier versions under both the GPL and a commercial license that I think included paid support. I assume any sales under the commercial license were to companies who wanted to include it in their closed-source software.
But the language defines that if you distribute a binary, you must make the source available, and that source is allowed to be taken, modified, redistributed as binary and source, as long as the person doing the modifications attributes you and all other previous authors.
It doesn’t matter if that binary comes as a firmware on a device the user purchased.
The distributor does not have to distribute the source with the binary, they just have to make it available, for free, and they cannot stop anyone using it as defined above.
Breaking the license does not change how the software is licensed, it just puts the entity doing the violations in violation of a license.
That page doesn’t say that at all. You can paywall the software and the source together for any price (but note that anyone who buys the software can now give out the source freely). Or you can charge for the source freely but only “for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source”.
sounds like it says that to me. “we can’t send you the source over the internet because of security reasons so you need to pay us for a plane ticket so one of our representatives can give you a cd directly” is evil and stupid but completely reasonable in a legal sense.
i’ve had to deal with situations like that before, not specifically because of gpl but because of international regulations. one of my customers was a digital id provider, and they had one of those super-accurate timekeeping/cryptography servers they needed to move from lithuania to sweden. because of laws surrounding encryption of personal information, the server would count as compromised if there was ever a single second where it was left without supervision. so they had two of their people drive non-stop through poland, germany, denmark and half of sweden with the server on a ups in the back seat.
Your thinking is off, the GPL and derived licenses like the AGPL are viral on purpose. They apply to everybody who uses, downloads, or accesses the software (in the case of the AGPL) and they are explicit about this:
what i’m reading from that is that both parties must agree that the work has been conveyed. with the risk of going all sovcit, if the conveyed item is a binary, and the producer does not send the source code to the consumer as instructed by the license, can the consumer really pull the source and distribute it? surely if the license is broken the work falls back on default permissions, e.g. all rights reserved?
In the general case, the person or persons who distributed the binary would then have done so illegally. In order to distribute, you have to follow the terms of the license. So them attempting to go after anyone downstream of them at that point is sort of like calling the police because someone stole your drug stash. And if there’s an upstream beyond the illegal distributors, they’re practically waving a “Sue me now!” placard in their direction.
The originator of the code, above whom there is no upstream, is allowed to offer it under more than one license (including a mixture of free and closed licenses), but the specific license in force has to be specified with each distributed copy.
Do you have an example of a project that has both free and commercial licenses? How does that work in practice?
The first one that comes to mind is Qt (the widget toolkit). While I’m not sure the current owners still do this, Trolltech offered the earlier versions under both the GPL and a commercial license that I think included paid support. I assume any sales under the commercial license were to companies who wanted to include it in their closed-source software.
Maybe read the GPL ;)
But the language defines that if you distribute a binary, you must make the source available, and that source is allowed to be taken, modified, redistributed as binary and source, as long as the person doing the modifications attributes you and all other previous authors.
It doesn’t matter if that binary comes as a firmware on a device the user purchased.
The distributor does not have to distribute the source with the binary, they just have to make it available, for free, and they cannot stop anyone using it as defined above.
Breaking the license does not change how the software is licensed, it just puts the entity doing the violations in violation of a license.
the fsf is off the opinion that you explicitly can paywall the sources separately from the product. that’s why i find this interesting.
That page doesn’t say that at all. You can paywall the software and the source together for any price (but note that anyone who buys the software can now give out the source freely). Or you can charge for the source freely but only “for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source”.
sounds like it says that to me. “we can’t send you the source over the internet because of security reasons so you need to pay us for a plane ticket so one of our representatives can give you a cd directly” is evil and stupid but completely reasonable in a legal sense.
I think it would be very difficult to argue that that is reasonable but that would be up to the courts to decide.
i’ve had to deal with situations like that before, not specifically because of gpl but because of international regulations. one of my customers was a digital id provider, and they had one of those super-accurate timekeeping/cryptography servers they needed to move from lithuania to sweden. because of laws surrounding encryption of personal information, the server would count as compromised if there was ever a single second where it was left without supervision. so they had two of their people drive non-stop through poland, germany, denmark and half of sweden with the server on a ups in the back seat.