On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 10:09 PM, Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo.berna...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The only real limitation is that if you're providing KiCad as a commercial > cloud service then a licensing agreement has to be negotiated with > SINTEF; No, I don't think this is correct. The AGPL, as the GPL, imposes absolutely no limitation on whether you can use code licensed under it for commercial or other purposes. If it did, it would not be a free license. What SINTEF is saying is the following: "here's a piece of code you can use if you respect the terms of the AGPL. If you don't want to respect them, we can allow you to do that in exchange of money." That's a completely different statement. Everybody is fully free to commercially use the code. You can even do so in two ways: respecting the AGPL or striking a private deal with SINTEF to avoid compliance with AGPL if you so wish. Here's another angle to it: the AGPL gives you freedoms, the famous 4 freedoms of free software. There is nothing SINTEF or anybody can do to take away those freedoms from you. There is no "undo" for publishing files under the AGPL. Same goes for the GPL. To come back to your statement, it would be more correct if it said "The only real limitation is that if you're providing KiCad as a commercial cloud service and do not want to comply with the AGPL terms, then a licensing agreement has to be negotiated with SINTEF." But we could say the same thing about every KiCad source file. If somebody wanted to use some of your GPL2+ licensed files and not comply with GPL2+, the only way they would have to do so is to discuss with you, because as the copyright holder you are the only one who has the right to modify the file and use another license header for that modified version. Cheers, Javier _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers Post to : kicad-developers@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp