GPL as an evaluation license

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 01:45:20PM +0300, Gabor Szabo wrote:
> 2011/4/10 Aviad Mandel <aviad.mandel at gmail.com>
> 
> > I hope this clarifies why GPL's limitation of distribution is so appealing
> > as an evaluation license: It stops the evaluation users exactly at the point
> > where they want to really use the software, in embedded terms. And if I'm
> > not wrong about the whole idea, a well-polished license like GPLv3 is by far
> > better than anything I can come up with, with or without ten lawyers, since
> > it's written based upon experience with legal issues worldwide, which I will
> > never be able to do.
> >
> >
> I don't know about the legal aspects and  I might not know much about the
> industry
> you are targeting but at some my clients there is a strict "no GPL" policy
> while at
> others the use of open source (especially GPL) requires the approval of the
> legal
> department which is complex. 

The alternative is not Apache or whatever. The alternative is a complex
propritary license. Which has to go through the legal department anyway.

> Most developers and their managers try
> to avoid it which effectively means using new open source code is difficult.
> Even if they are already using a lot of open source tools and code.
> 
> IMHO in most of these cases the GPL license will be a deterrence
> from even trying the thing.

But this is when the GPL is used in production. Not for evaluation.

Oh, and there are certainly other industries:
http://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59/android_tablets/

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen         | tzafrir at jabber.org | VIM is
http://tzafrir.org.il |                    | a Mutt's
tzafrir at cohens.org.il |                    |  best
tzafrir at debian.org    |                    | friend