Wine license change

[Steve Langasek]

On Wed, Feb 13, 2002 at 03:42:07PM -0500, Roger Fujii wrote:

> > The solution as I see it is for GPL/BSD/whatever programmers to actually 
> > cough up something non-technical users not only would use, but would 
> > *prefer*.  *Then* support and selling binaries becomes a worthwhile 
> > proposition. 

> you cannot sell *gpl binaries.  You can sell the media, but not the content.
> Think sun has a good idea with dual licensing and having assignment of the
> copyright.  This allows them to change the license so that they can make
> a productized version.

Since this is not the first time this mistruth show up in the discussion 
here, I think a clarification is warranted.

The second paragraph of section 1 of the GPL (v.2) states:

  You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and
  you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.

The only limits that the GPL places on sales is that once someone has 
received a copy of binaries from you, you can't sell them the SOURCE at an 
additional cost that's higher than your distribution cost.  Up to that 
point, you can charge people whatever you want to for access to GPLed 
*content*.  You just don't have any power to make sure that others don't 
sell that same content at a price lower than yours, or even give it away.

And although the LGPL is a different license (which is important to keep 
in mind when talking about '*gpl'), the same permission is granted by the 
LGPL to charge a fee (an arbitrary fee) for copies of the software.

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer