On Thu, 2005-06-16 at 12:50 +0200, Jeremiah Foster wrote:

Hello,

I am including an email from the Fedora users mailing list regarding licensing issues with the GPL. I felt the original poster would get more help here than from the other list where the danger of innaccurate information is somewhat higher.

The usual disclaimers apply - IANAL, seek proper legal advise etc. The following is my interpretation of the GNU GPL and LGPL as applied to proprietary software.

I am asking this list for advise since I don't know where to get help on this issue. I tried mailing the Free Software Foundation but they haven't answered my mail.

So I am making a product, that was originally meant to be distributed as GPL. Now the buyer asks me to release it under a comercial license.

What would be helpful at this point would be a description of why the buyer wants a proprietary licence rather than using the GPL. What discussion has there been so far?

Here's the catch: One module of the product uses LGPL'ed code, and the icons used in the product are GPL as well. Would it be possible for me to make a comercial license that says: License for 'module X', and 'icons': GPL License for the total product: not free. Does anyone has experience with this or know where to turn to for these kind of questions?

Code which is under the LGPL may be linked together with proprietary code. Code (and data, such as icons) which is under the GPL and subsequently distributed may not. See the respective licences for the specific details, but provided you meet the criteria set out under the LGPL module licence (providing object code so that the user may relink using later versions of the module - you don't specify the language(s) you're using, incidentally - it's easier to accomplish this with certain languages than others). Regarding the icons, my opinion is that you cannot use these unless you can get them under a different licence. However, the opinion that actually matters in this case is the opinion of the author of the icons. Have you contacted the author? It's the intent of the author that actually matters at the end of the day - if you can get it in writing that they're happy for you to use the icons in your proprietary application then it'd be difficult for them to sue you later.

However, I'd still be interested to know why, if the software was originally intended to be available under the GPL why your buyer has changed their mind (and what can be done to sway them back again). There are a few different tacks you could take to try and persuade them, but if you can give some more background information I/we might be able to help some more.

Cheers,

Gareth