Hello everybody,
i post to this list the official position of Brett Smith, Licensing
Compliance Engineer at Free Software Foundation.
He hasn't time to partecipate to the list but i could forward his
position:
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The GPL makes a distinction between charging for a copy of the program,
and charging for a license. If you were charging for the license, that
means that you could require *everyone* who receives the software to pay
you a fee, even if they get it from someone else, and that's what's
against the rules.
If you're charging only for the copy that you provide, the license
doesn't care about the details of the transaction. Whether you're
distributing the software by itself, as part of a collection of
software, or preinstalled on some kind of physical hardware, you can
charge a fee for it and still comply with the GPL.
You can see the practical results of this distinction in our FAQ; if you
start at
<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney>, and read the two questions after that one, you'll see the answers change from "Yes" to "No."
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P.s. If anybody has further questions you could contact Brett writing at
licensing@(NOSPAM)fsf.org with this subject : gnu.org #354583.
Cheers,
Stefano
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Received on Thu Jan 31 20:15:33 2008
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