On Wed, 19 Mar 2014 03:08:07 +0100, rakesh mailgroups
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
I emailed a company about using its free version during development of
our
app and they said it can't be used for commercial projects (there's
paid-for versions for that).
Then I realised there's no way for that to be enforced because the tool
does not end up in the final product.
Whats the point of stipulating restrictions of use when its
unenforceable?
There's a point, of course, because people should respect contracts just
because they respect other people, not only because they fear to be
punished. But I understand your objection, that company might be naive and
trust too much in people. This doesn't mean they don't have a good
business model - I don't know what the tool does, but perhaps in some
cases they can sell support. So it's a matter of chances: they think that
even though a relevant amount of people won't respect the contract, the
fraction of whose who do, or those who need to pay for support, is enough
for sustainability.
Note that this is not a black & white problem. If I release a GPL library,
in theory I can enforce the contract because the bytes end up in the final
product. Still, if the software is not open sourced and is running on a
server, nobody can see it but the owner. There's no automatic tool that
can check licenses in servers around the world and I'm not aware of any
police that periodically performs mass inspections - I mean, the
police/military corps that deal with taxes should do that, but as far as I
see they only act after a direct complaint; but for someone to make a
complaint, he had to know something in advance, and without seeing the
bytes he can't.
--
Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect @ Tidalwave s.a.s.
"We make Java work. Everywhere."
http://tidalwave.it/fabrizio/blog - [email protected]
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