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.
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. The project immediately started to grow, resulting in a number of incoming requests for support and help.
This led Mike to start a consulting and support business, Glyptodon, the success of which allowed him to quit his day job and work on Guacamole full-time by Along the way, they contributed Guacamole to the Apache Software Foundation, where it officially became the Apache Guacamole project.
After a few years, Mike and his business partners, James Muehlner and Frank La, began to think about ways to scale the business. By the beginning of , they realized that their services and support model would be difficult to scale out and decided to transition to a subscription licensing model. The result of this was Glyptodon Enterprise, a packaged, supported version of Apache Guacamole. Here's how they're evolving into a sellable open source option.
Every business must answer the question—what is the thing of value to offer that customers will pay for? Businesses built on open source software face additional questions around how they simultaneously serve free users while still building a customer base.
Stephen Walli often likes to comment that a user community is a group of people with excess time but no money, and customers are people with money but no time. A business that makes its money on open source software should find a way to incorporate both groups into its model.
More Great Content Free online course: RHEL technical overview Learn Advanced Linux Commands Download Cheat Sheets Find an Open Source Alternative Read Top Linux Content Check out open source resources So the real question is, what can you offer that saves customers time and effort, making their lives easier, while still building out a community of users and contributors that are the lifeblood for sustaining the project?
Apache Guacamole is robust and easy for the end user, but an admin needs to understand some of the finer points of networking and remote access in order to successfully use the technology. This is where Glyptodon Enterprise comes in—it saves the customer time and effort by providing a pre-built solution that is easier for admins to incorporate into their environment than if they started from scratch with Apache Guacamole.
Deciding what to sell was relatively easy because the pain point was obvious—installing and maintaining the software. But how would the commercial effort relate to the open source project? How does one flow into the other, and how can you ensure the success of both? And can you really build a business selling something that can be obtained for free?
The answers, in order: the open source upstream flows into the commercial downstream; by creating a commercial space and maintaining it separately from the open source community space; and yes, as I will demonstrate. One of my favorite reference points for building a business on open source software is Red Hat, and how they built out a model for commercial solutions that sell, while still supporting the upstream communities that sustain the technology innovation.
As a long-time proponent of this model, I'm happy to report that it is gaining traction elsewhere. There is a misunderstanding that goes way back about this particular model that it is a support and services business, which is simply not true. The only kind of profit strategy that is incompatible with Open Source is monopoly-based sales, also known as "royalties".
See this article for how to think about business strategies that make money from Open Source. Also, this survey of open source leaders including many OSI Directors provides several business models for Free and Open Source software. Yes, you can. But depending on the license, you probably can't stop your customers from selling it in the same manner as you.
See the commercial use for more details. 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 letting them use your trademarks or other identifying attributes, except insofar as they would be permitted to anyway for example, in nominative use doctrine.
There are many companies and other organizations that release open source code while exercising tight control over their trademarks. Trademarks and other marks of attribution are primarily about preventing public confusion over identity and provenance, and therefore trademark regulation is useful in Open Source software in the same way it is useful generally.
Alas, no, it is a trademark and we need to retain control over it. Please see our Trademark and Logo Usage guidelines. You can always use a trademark in a truthful manner to refer accurately to an entity. Yes, but you don't have to ask permission. It's always okay to link to anybody 's site.
Linking to something is like saying its name and address out loud. Generally, yes. Look at the bottom of each page for the Creative Commons License. That gives you fairly broad permission to re-use the material; read the license to see the exact permissions. The best place to discuss an issue about an open source license, or about a potential open source license, is on our license-discuss mailing list, about which you can read more on our mailing lists page.
You do not have to be subscribed to post, but posts from non-members are moderated solely to prevent spam , so please be patient if it takes a few days for your first post to show up. For questions about submitting new licenses, you may also want to read about the license approval process.
We are not a legal services organization and we can't give you legal advice. If you want legal advice, you need to have an attorney-client relationship with a lawyer.
Even if the lawyer is pro bono , there still needs to be a formal client arrangement. Without giving you legal advice, we can still give you advice about community norms and expectations. It won't be legal advice, but you may find it useful when talking with your lawyer or, if necessary, coming to a decision without the help of a lawyer.
The OSI's work, and thus funding support, focuses on the creation and curation of resources that enable, promote, and protect open source software development, adoption, and communities. The OSI cannot directly fund your open source software project, we fund projects that raise awareness and adoption of your open source software project. If you are looking for funding opportunities and other resources to support your open source software development project, you may want to try and join, or align your project with an existing open source software community.
If you can find a complimentary project or supporting foundation much of the work needed to develop your own community of practice will be done. It will also introduce you and your software to other projects, developers, contributors, and sponsors who are working on similar or aligned efforts, understand your project and its value, and thus may want to collaborate with you to see it succeed as a part of their larger work, project, and or foundation.
Unfortunately, we can't; Open Source is now too big for us to keep track of all the people and activities in it. A web search engine is your best bet. For specific software packages, you may also find it useful to look in Freecode. Visit the lists page, and click on the appropriate "unsubscribe" link to generate the necessary email request.
Most open source projects are run via online discussion forums: mailing lists, wikis, chat rooms, etc. We encourage you to find a project you care about, look at their web site to see what kinds of discussion forums they're using, and join those forums. We do not personally answer surveys. Read this for more information. If you're a for-profit corporation that uses or produces open source software and pretty much every corporation falls into at least one of those categories these days!
The OSI web site uses the Drupal content management system Drupal is, of course, open source software. The web page content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4. However, the web pages are stored in our Drupal database, so it's not as if one can "check out" a copy of the OSI web site using a version control system as is typically done with software projects and send a change back to us using a patch, pull request, or other method commonly used in open source software projects.
Instead, just contact us with your proposed change, and we'll review it by email. For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative OSI has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and build bridges between open source communities of practice.
As a global non-profit , the OSI champions software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition OSD , and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement. Open source software is made by many people and distributed under an OSD-compliant license which grants all the rights to use, study, change, and share the software in modified and unmodified form.
Software freedom is essential to enabling community development of open source software. Skip to main content. Home Contact Donate Login. Search form. Frequently Answered Questions. Can Open Source software be used for commercial purposes? Can I restrict how people use an Open Source licensed program?
Can I stop "evil people" from using my program? What is "free software" and is it the same as "open source"? What is "copyleft"? Is it the same as "open source"? What is a "permissive" Open Source license? Can I call my program "Open Source" even if I don't use an approved license?
Is a license an Open Source license if it differs by only a few words from a license listed on your website? Yes, the GPL license allows users to sell the original as well as the modified software. It may be confusing, but free software is referred to as free in terms of freedom and not in terms of price. In fact, as we argued in previous posts , open source software may sometimes be safer than proprietary software since you have more people checking and fixing problems.
GPL requires you to release the modified source code only if you release the modified program. However, if you make the modified program available to the public, you will have to make the code public too.
To combine two codes into a larger work, both the programs must permit it. The third difference between the two versions is that the GPLv3 was written in an attempt to increase usage worldwide. The language used in GPLv3 to describe the license rights was modified to ensure that international laws will interpret it as the FSF intended, unlike the language used in GPLv2, which is considered very US centric.
GPLv3 also allows developers to add local disclaimers, which also helps increasing its usage outside the US. The new language used in the GPLv3 establishes this even more clearly. There is, however, an issue with the original BSD license as it imposes a specific requirement that is not in the GPL the requirement on advertisements of the program.
0コメント