Marco Fioretti answers a member's questions about charging fees for software that's made available under the GNU GPL License version 2 or 3.
- Please give me simple advice on this topic: Is it okay when selling software to charge small fees for it (e.g. 1/2 dollars) if that software is made available under the GNU GPL License version 2 or 3?
- If yes, when I sell such software, should I provide source code as well or just the license together with the executable file?
Since these are very general questions, we decided that I should answer with a public post, of course starting with a big...
DISCLAIMER: First, this post covers almost exclusively GPL licensed
software, but there are other free/open source software (FOSS) licenses
that work in different ways. Above all, I am not
a lawyer, and some details below may be slightly different in some
jurisdictions and/or specific sub-cases that I can't completely cover
here. Be sure to check the links at the bottom of this post for more
details.
With that said, dear reader, the short answer to your first
question is: yes, you can legally sell software with a GPL license
version 2 or 3 for whatever price you want to charge.
The GNU project itself "encourages people who redistribute free software
to charge as much as they wish or can... You can charge nothing, a
penny, a dollar, or a billion dollars. It's up to you, and the
marketplace."
Please note that "as much as you wish" only applies to the executable
form of the software, not its source code. This is explained in subsections 6a and 6b of the GPL: if you want to sell a binary copy of a GPL software program, you must include either its complete
source code or a written, formal offer valid at least three years to
provide it to whoever possesses the binary. In more detail, you have to
provide:
- a copy of the complete sources for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically delivering them, or
- "access to copy [the complete sources] from a network server at no charge"
Of course, all users of free software enjoy these same freedoms.
The people to whom you sold copies of GPL software are just as free as
you are to make copies and sell them for whatever price they feel is right, including a price equal to zero.
The same general conditions apply to other popular FOSS licenses.
OpenOffice, for example, is distributed under the Apache license. This
means (quoting from a resource link below) that everybody can sell it via
eBay or any other channel, for whatever price people are willing to
pay, without any obligation to share their profits with the OpenOffice
Community.
What about identity and customer rights?
GPL and other FOSS licenses give everybody the right to "sell" software
with the constraints above, for whatever price the market will bear.
They do not, however, give anybody the right to fool customers or
give them misleading information. They couldn't do it, even if those
were good things. At the same time, in and by themselves, licenses
can't protect you from certain abuses.
Again, I'm not a lawyer, but here's an explanation that should be
substantially correct. Software licenses are applications of copyright.
Software developers can impose conditions (that is, licenses) on the
reuse and redistribution of their code, because they hold the copyright
on that code. Copyright also deals with attribution: in general, even if
you may redistribute my code, you may not claim that you are the
original author.
Copyright and licenses do not regulate
"identity"-related issues outside the code itself. Company names and
logos, for examples, are the domain of different legal constructs, e.g.
trademarks.
If you grab some software I released with a GPL or similar license, you
do get the right (among others) to sell that code as I explained above,
without giving a penny back or even saying thanks. You do not, however, automatically get any right to:
- say that that is your original work
- keep the logo of my organization on it
- tell your customers, or let them believe, that we are partners, or that I am obligated in any way to give them support or refunds if they're not satisfied
This doesn't mean that those actions are always, surely illegal! It just
means that they are "customers rights" or "fair business" issues
outside the scope of the software license.
So, that is why the
Apache license says that you can do pretty much what you want with the
code as such, but you must obtain their permission before using
their trademarks, including their logo. These are also the reasons why
we can have GNU/Linux distributions like CentOS, which is basically the
same as Red Hat minus "vendor branding and artwork."
Additional resources
To find out more about selling free/open source software, please
check these resources, which are the ones I used as my basis for this
post:
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