Re: [Fsfe-uk] BECTA discriminate against FLOSS?

[Martyn]

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On Saturday 03 January 2004 21:12, Paul Tansom wrote:
> Is there a practical and FLOSS friendly license that would allow
> personal and business use of an application, but not resale of services
> or support without permission (not necessarily implying a financial side
> here)? ..or is this against the FLOSS ethos? I'd assume that this is
> most practically achieved through trademark of a name, and sidestepped
> by a fork! Again, mainly curiosity here I guess. Oh the joys of
> politics, business and putting food on the table ;-)

Sorry, must butt in here, from a commercial perspective, I've avoided so far,
mainly because I am not in any way involved in education.

Such a licence prevents VARs, Linux Support Companies, Linux Trainers and
Linux Integrators using such a piece of software - there are actually
examples of this out there.

If everyone used a license like this (which, if it were accepted by a FLOSS
group, it would spread rather quickly), it says to business : no, you can't
make money by selling the software, you can't make money by supporting the
software, you can't make money using the software etc.   If the message that
businesses cannot make a profit by providing, and in some cases using FLOSS
is sent out then there will be a large group of I.T. companies feeling that
they may as well go back to selling MS.  Imagine if Apache was under a
similar license - you can use this, as long as you're not an ISP - what
percentage of webservers would be using it?

The point about FLOSS is that you are free to do anything with it, so long as
it's still free.  Put restrictions upon that (even just ask first, maybe
we'll get around to you in a month or so, by which time the customer has gone
elsewhere*) and you can cripple both your distribution channels (don't you
want users?) and if widespread enough, very valuable FLOSS supporters.

*Cynical I know, but it happens.

- --
Martyn Ranyard
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