Page 2 - Legal use of a PHP script

There are 3 separate things in play. There is the actual sale of a GPL'd product. There is delivery of the source code. And there is the sale of a service that uses a GPL'd product.

sale of GPL'd product
I created a product called phpBB Blog. It is GPL'd. You have every right to take my code and sell it for $10,000. You don't have to pay me a penny. It is the same with any product that uses the GPL 2 license.

delivery of source code
But that brings us to the source code. You are REQUIRED to give away the source code to any customer who asks for it, and they get it under the GPL license that I used. Now, you can charge them for delivery of the source code. However, you're capped at whatever you charged to deliver the product. So if you charged $10,000 for the product, you can't charge more than that to deliver the source code.

Once the person has the source code and the GPL license, they are free to sell it, and they can undercut your price. If they want to sell it for $100, they can. And of course, I'm still giving it away for $0. So you can quickly see that the source code issue effectively allows for competitors to spring up, but also nearly kills off the ability to charge for the product. Everyone will just go to the vendor offering it for free. And if no one offers it for free, a single person can buy the product, get the source code, and then offer it for free himself.

sale of a service
If you use a GPL'd product to provide a service -- in this case, no one else is downloading the product itself, and no one is downloading the source code -- then you effectively skirt most requirements. Take my phpBB Blog. A company could set that up on their server and offer to allow anyone to blog. Now, they don't give away my product, they just use it to generate all the blogs. At this point, they can charge people to blog, and they don't even have to give away the source code. Why? Well, they're not technically selling my product, they're selling the output of my product. So they have no obligation to provide my source code.

Another example is Inkscape. That's a GPL'd art program. You can get it for free, and charge $100,000 to create a logo for a company. The company gets your logo not Inkscape. Because you're selling them just the logo, you are under no obligation to GPL your logo. In addition, you are under no obligation to give them the source code to Inkscape. In addition, if you have coded in improvements to Inkscape that give you a competitive advantage, you are under no obligation to give those code improvements to anyone else.

However, the moment you sell a "new Inkscape with my improvements" you definitely ARE required to give away your code improvements, along with the original code.

It was rumored that GPL 3 would fix this loophole. But now that the GPL 3 is out in beta form, it's clear that they don't care about that. And that's fine. Because this is one of the only ways you can start to truly compete. I used a GPL'd product to run my Publisher Database Web site. I have greatly customized the code, to make my site stand out against the competition. I do not have to give them my code, as long as the code stays on private on my server.

-Tony

using the script as a service on your site, yes you can sell subscriptions to that service, support, advertisements etc. maybe even odd exclusive results of that script using your information.

But the script itself..why? Selling the script that is GPL, would not get you very far as anyone has the right to download it as well, the same right you were given.

Think service industry, not product industry, and you'll be in a better frame of mind. You didn't create the product.

So for example, devshed forums rock, so the product is in a way free, but the advertising that supports the site is not right?

They could have used a free GPL webforum. We don't really care, as long as it's free to use for us.

Free to use, pay for additional useful services upon which it is based. Done.


Good Luck
sf2k