Busting the Myth of GPL

vendure.io

5 points·alexzeitler··5 comments

Having been through due diligence for 3 start up sales, I will tell you 100% if you have GPLv3 code you are going to have a fun time justifying how it hasn't made your software FOSS.

Ive seen auditors with automated license software now that will find any GPLv3 code and dump it all to a CSV for you to discuss.

Someone left a GPL v3 license in one of our repos and it started an interrogation.

Maybe lawyers are overreacting, or maybe they don't want to fuck around and find out.

Author here. We chose to offer a dual commercial license for this case, which is not GPL and carries none of the obligations regarding sharing source code.

Of course the tradeoff is that it is not free (as in beer), but if your startup is getting sold then hopefully you got enough value out of our software to pay for a commercial license.

EDIT - I was wrong

The GPL explicitly exempts the case of hiring developers to work on GPL'd software for you:

> You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright. Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

Thanks for filling me in a out that.

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