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It is perfectly permissible to distribute under GPLv3 software for using a service, access to which is restricted to registered, or even paying, users. Scrolling down my Android phone, the first example I come across is Mastercom Workbook, a GPLv3+ client which is used to access the workbook functionality of Mastercom's professional offering. If your ...
14
If you do not depend on any GPL license grants to distribute your software (i.e., you are the sole copyright holder and/or you make use of no one else's GPL'd code), you may achieve this by not offering your code under the GPL at all, but under some other homemade license that prevents redistribution and otherwise grants rights similar to the GPL. Insofar as ...
9
If I write some program from scratch, I can choose to license as open source under e.g. GPLv3, and simultaneously license it for a stiff fee for use in closed source applications, no GPL strings attached. I could even get tired of it all and sell all rights. If my project gets third party contributions, I'll have to make sure the relevant rights are ...
9
Could this scenario be considered unfair?
No. It is simply a bad business plan of company A.
The GPL and other open source (as in freedom, not beer) licenses are exactly what they are. There is no "if, when or but". One reads the license, follows it to the letter, and that is that. There is no moral, ethics or fairness here.
Company A was able to ...
6
Your idea is not going to work.
License terms for a copyrighted work can only be set/dictated by someone who has a copyright claim on the work. And just as Microsoft doesn't have a copyright claim on the documents you write with MS Word, in the same way you don't have a copyright claim on the artistic works created with your software.
For copyright purposes, ...
5
Yes, it's OK to not have any license file.
Without any license, the default is that all rights are reserved. If someone other than the author wants to use this code, they have the obligation of obtaining a valid license.
For open source projects, there are a variety of conventions to unambiguously indicate licenses. For example:
separate files named like ...
5
I have research information on licensing for the past two days and from what I understand my project is considered as a derivative work from the original project. According to that, my project also needs to be under GPL, that I understand.
This is mostly correct. The bits of code that you translated from C to Python are almost certainly a derivative work of ...
3
From Open Source Initiative website FAQs: https://opensource.org/faq#copying-and-identity
Does Open Source mean anybody else can use my name and logo?
No, at least not any more than they could otherwise. Open Source is about software source code, not about identity. That is, letting people use your code under an Open Source license is not the same as ...
2
That is not strange at all. It is a requirement of basically every license that authorship is acknowledged. Open source does not mean 'free to use without any obligation'.
Thus the right thing to do is to display in the 'about' tab, the readme or on the same place you show your copyright also the copyright notices of 3rd party software used - like this ...
2
The binaries are derivative of the source, so if you choose to distribute them, you must do so under the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA.
If you choose to publish source code that is derivative of CC BY-NC-SA, your code must be distributed under that same license. However, there is no requirement that you publish your modifications in source form, even when ...
2
Have I read this correctly? Obviously it's not very fair, either to the original authors or software users, to omit that information, but it seems like it would be legal to do so?
Yes, you have read it correctly and it is indeed legal to omit mentioning which third-party code a particular license statement refers to (assuming the project's is not referenced ...
2
The whole can only be distributed under the intersection of the rights granted, i.e., the most restrictive licence of the pieces. That would be GPL.
Make sure you include all licenses, and state where each piece of your chimaera comes from (so any would-be enhancer/user of the code knows the provenances and attached restrictions).
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If you license your client under GPLv3 and distribute it to the general public, then you have to be aware that the general public is allowed to do two things:
They can create a clone of your subscription service (paid or free) and give their users a slightly modified version of your software (still licensed under GPLv3) which connects to their service ...
1
I am working on a Java framework that I would like to distribute with GPL V3 but ...
Everything after the but is incompatible with all versions of GPL.
GPL basically legalizes "piracy" (because legally it is not "piracy" if you have given your users permission to distribute your code). Any user of your code can post it on his own github ...
1
In what way is this unfair? You gave P the software under the condition that they follow the terms of the license. As long as they're obeying the license, they're doing exactly what you asked. Are you upset that they're making money? If that's the case, use a license that expressly forbids commercial use. You can't simultaneously give someone permission ...
1
What the FAQ entry is referring to are comment blocks like this one
/*!
* Bootstrap v5.0.2 (https://getbootstrap.com/)
* Copyright 2011-2021 The Bootstrap Authors (https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/graphs/contributors)
* Licensed under MIT (https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/main/LICENSE)
*/
and it is telling you that you must not delete them from ...
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