[Discuss] Profiting from GPL software

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 07:31:42PM -0500, IngeGNUe wrote:
> On 01/25/16 23:40, Julian Daich wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > El 10/11/15 a las 12:03, Steve Litt escribi?:
> >> On Mon, 9 Nov 2015 14:40:52 -0500
> >> Rich Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>> I did not say you can't try to charge money for it. I said that you 
> >>>> can't make a profit from trying to sell it. Again I ask: what is 
> >>>> dishonest about this statement?
> >> Nothing that I see. I reached the same conclusion more than a decade
> >> ago. After you sell your first copy, you're competing against zero cost
> >> copies of your product.
> > 
> > If you are the original author, what about doing GPL but releasing the
> > sources after doing some profit?
> > 
> > Best,
> > 
> > Julian
> > 
> 
> I'm not good with legalese, but does the GPL allow for that? For
> releasing the source code only after payment?

You can charge any price you'd like for GPL'd software. To every
customer, you must provide the source code, or an offer to
provide the source code for the cost of shipping it to them --
which, in the era of semi-ubiquitous Internet, is a few pennies.

You can sell non-GPL software and then GPL it later. You can
sell software under one license and give it away under the GPL
at the same time, as long as you are the sole copyright owner or
have all the other contributors agree to the arrangement.

You can give away or sell GPL software and charge for support,
or charge for custom feature development, but you can't forbid
anyone else from doing the same with their copy of the source.

-dsr-