GPL as an evaluation license

[Omer Zak]

IANAL either.

But what you are looking for is, in principle, dual licensing.
The providers of MySQL and Qt follow the same model.  Their software
libraries are available under either GPL (with all the restrictions it
entails) or under a proprietary license.

When a client of yours gets your software under proprietary license, you
are free to impose whichever terms you want upon them, including terms
under which they are allowed to transfer the software to third parties.

--- Omer


On Sat, 2011-04-09 at 15:50 +0300, Aviad Mandel wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> I know you're not lawyers, but I though you could help me with a GPL
> issue.
> 
> I'm writing a function library in C which I want to sell licenses for,
> targeting a specialized industry. To make my entry point better, I
> plan to release it under GPL (as opposed to LGPL) so that potential
> users can evaluate it properly before making a decision. My target
> industry is far far away from FOSS, so I'm pretty sure that they won't
> release their own code under GPL in order to adopt mine free (as in
> beer).
> 
> So as long as I make sure I own all copyrights, will this work
> legally?
> 
> Two main questions:
> 
> (1) Is GPL giving me the enough protection?
> (2) Will GPL allow a company which hasn't bought a non-GPL license
> enough freedom to evaluate the library?
> 
> What makes this slightly complicated, is what happens when company X
> decides to take my library and integrate it into their proprietary
> software for evaluation. Even for their internal copies, they can't
> badge the whole package as GPL, because they don't necessarily own the
> rights to all components, and may not even have all sources.
> 
> So let's look at the case where the company has just linked my GPL'ed
> library with their proprietary source codes + proprietary libraries
> for which the company only has as binaries.
> 
> Now person X wants to send a copy of the software's binary (my library
> included) to person Y, say over email. Under what conditions is it
> legal? If person Y works at the same company? For the same company
> (outsourcing)? Has access to everything necessary to build the
> software, so that person Y could in theory build the binary from
> software owned by the company + the library under GPL?

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