Ask HN: FOSS for Profit? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: FOSS for Profit?

4 pointsholograham5 comments

How do you determine if a FOSS product is allowable for profit usage? I work at a large corporation that has a lengthy review process if you need to use FOSS for your project. FOSS is discouraged if there is a market solution. The impression I have is the company has a team of lawyers review the licensing and determines if we can make money off of it.

I know Paul Graham provides YC startups with the legal advice to start their company. However before that ever happens typically people spend lots of time producing a prototype/V1 of their vision. If they create it and its not allowed to be used for profit wouldn't that pose a huge problem?

View on HN

Read the license. If it's one of the usual "open source" licenses, for-profit use of the software is allowed. (It's not considered 'open source' if it discriminates against for-profit uses.)

Perhaps you also mean whether the software can be included in your for-profit, for-sale, possibly closed-source product. The answer is still 'read the license'. Some licenses are OK with that reuse, others aren't.

If you're wrestling with subtle GPL interpretations or 'copyleft' clauses you'll want to read more of the way these things have been interpreted in the past. But there's no shortcut beyond reading and understanding for yourself, and it's not so complicated it needs paid-professional interpretation unless (1) you're with a giant risk-averse bureaucratic organization; and/or (2) you're trying to pull something fishy, far from the usual interpretations. (eg: "Is there some loophole way we can structure our code to include GPL code without making our entire product GPL'd?")

I hear you on the "giant risk-averse bureaucratic organization".

What if you don't understand a clause? Or worse if you think you understand....build a product...make a million...then get sued for half?

They're not that complicated. Look around; read how others have summarized things; do the same as other companies that haven't been sued.

If you're in an industry around intellectual property there's no excuse for not acquiring the base level of competence and understanding that allows you, the developer, to tell whether or not a certain open-source license allows you to do what you want to do or not.

Read the license

Improvement: Get a lawyer to read the licence.

That's even less necessary than having a lawyer review every 'terms of service' you agree to when installing software or registering for a website.

The licenses are a few pages. Most is boilerplate. Only a few concepts (mainly copyleft and some of the newer patent-related clauses) are tricky -- but you're still going to be safe if you follow the example of the many, many other reusers of open-source software.

Really, this question indicates more idle worry than is justified. What small companies have been screwed because they misunderstood the finer points of an open source license?

The companies that have gotten in trouble are those that have tried to stretch the licenses in new ways, or had negligent developers who didn't even notice (or actively hid) that they'd lifted open source code.

Seriously, if you're literate, smart enough to write software, and confident enough to start a business, this stuff is easy to figure out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com