GPL as an evaluation license

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 03:02:06PM +0300, Gabor Szabo wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 2:26 PM, Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir at cohens.org.il>wrote:
> 
> > > >
> > > 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.
> >
> > In many cases the alternative is to write the thing in-house in a
> less reusable way, without unit-test but with more bugs.
> 

You're not reading things in context.

> 
> 
> > > 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.
> >
> 
> So the developer will say: OK I know the company does not want me to use
> GPL code so let me just check it out to see if it would work even though
> though I was told they cannot use it.
> 

Which is funny, as a typical "evaluation" license permits you far less
than the GPL and is far less understood than it. For a typical example
see, well...

Well, you typically can't even find the license on-line.

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