GPLv3 discussion draft 3 is out

[Albert Dengg]

Guido Serra wrote:
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>> If you distribute a GPL-derived work to one of your clients, you are
>> obliged to give the sources to them, and only to them. No one else is
>> entitled to a copy of the sources, if they did not get the binaries.
>>
>> Of course, your client is then free to give binaries *and* sources to
>> whomever they please, subject to the same requirement.
>>
>> Whether changing configuration files, instead of sources, constitutes a
>> derived work is a murkier matter, with no general answers.
> 
> he he, you centered the question... that's my problem
> 
> anyway i have no problem at all, when integrating everything, if i find 
> a bug, to correct it, contact the project maintainer, and distribute the 
> source to my customers
> 
> the problem is just on "configuration" and "bundling" scripts,
> that's my "asset" ... i get payed for
ok my situation is insofar different as i'm not selfemployed...

but just think about the following:
you know your buildsystem once you have it the way you want it to be, 
whereas everybody else who want's to use it for his own customation has 
to invest (maybe) a lot of time to work into it. so while you would need 
1-2 hours for a small change, somebody else has to study it and find out 
  what problems could arise from using it. so for a (very) configurably 
system, the other guy has to invest maybe a week or so at least to get 
near your knowlege you have about it.
so since time _does_ have a price (which is quite considerable) to 
buissneses.

ok, so what if some other consultant works into your system and uses it?
well, you will have a competitor, though if you make it right and it 
gets accepted, you will also get patches and so on back which also is 
valuable for you.

but there is another part:
the point of free software is that you give everything _to your 
customer_, not necesarily to the genral public and i don't think they 
want to change that int gplv3, since this would lead to problems for 
example for the buissness model of offering customizations for in house 
development where there could be the problem that you could also 
encounter the situation where you have a customer that says "ok i want 
to have this work done on this gpl projekt, but you will only give it to 
me and not to anybody elese because you will incoperate knowlege of our 
interior workings...


just my opinion of course...

yours
albert