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Open Source Maintenance Fee

github.com

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Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#3

Post by mytailorisrich »

Not a lawyer so confused about how requiring a fee to get the binary is in practice compatible with open source licenses, which grant the right to redistribute said binary. I.e. even if the project itself does not want to give me a copy of the binary, anyone who has obtained that binary can lawfully gice it to me.

Basically, my understanding is that as long as the software is released under an open source license it is not possible to require a payment for its use or to limit distribution. If you wish to do that you need to relicence.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#6

Post by Spivak »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #3

Not a lawyer so confused about how requiring a fee to get the binary is in practice compatible with open source licenses, which grant the right to redistribute said binary. I.e. even if the project itself does not want to give me a copy of the binary, anyone who has obtained that binary can lawfully gice it to me. Basically, my understanding is that as long as the software is released under an open source license it…

You can sell open source software and you can charge for binaries and add additional terms on the binaries that restrict distribution. This is how RHEL works. But what you can't do is prevent someone who acquired the source from distributing the source and their own binaries. Which is how Rocky Linux works.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#7

Post by woodruffw »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #3

Not a lawyer so confused about how requiring a fee to get the binary is in practice compatible with open source licenses, which grant the right to redistribute said binary. I.e. even if the project itself does not want to give me a copy of the binary, anyone who has obtained that binary can lawfully gice it to me. Basically, my understanding is that as long as the software is released under an open source license it…

I think the distinction being made here is between the source code (which is remaining open source) and the binary (which is effectively becoming proprietary). Users would no longer have a right to redistribute the binary, since it would no longer be open source.

(To my understanding, this is similar to Microsoft’s “trick” for discouraging VS Code forks: VS Code and many of its core extensions are open source, but their builds are not.)

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#8

Post by Cheer2171 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #3

Not a lawyer so confused about how requiring a fee to get the binary is in practice compatible with open source licenses, which grant the right to redistribute said binary. I.e. even if the project itself does not want to give me a copy of the binary, anyone who has obtained that binary can lawfully gice it to me. Basically, my understanding is that as long as the software is released under an open source license it…

> license it is not possible to require a payment for its use or to limit distribution

Those two are not the same, see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

You can also try to charge $10000 for a gold plated CD copy of the Linux kernel without having committed a line yourself.

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