Romain d'Alverny a écrit :
On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 21:24, Dick Gevers<[email protected]> wrote:
If the need arises, what problem would there be if any number of Mageia
volunteers set up a commercial "Mageia Service SA" with a license from the
Mageia non-profit association to provide such commercial support? They
could make a contract that the profits from the SA would go to the
association and/or the shareholders and/or the employed volunteers at
certain agreed percentages of the earnings.
This is something we expect and welcome to happen: companies providing
commercial support and services from and around the distribution.
We expect this to happen as they would need, to be consistent with
their own business, to contribute back to the Mageia project: be it
upstream patches, sponsoring, resources, developers time, any other
role, etc. (of course, such a contribution would not, in any case,
alter the governance of the project).
Indeed, licensing and guidelines for this to happen smoothly have to
be thought out properly.
Romain
_____
Note that gpl v3 doesn't require that 3rd parties contribute back to the
Mageia project, although Mageia could make that an additional requirement.
The GPL v3 does require that any changes that are conveyed to other
parties, be conveyed with the source code and a GPL v3 licence.
However if a customer contracts exclusive modifications not to be
conveyed to other parties, then under GPL v3 there is explicitly no
requirement to release this code (source or not) to any other party.
This should not be required by Mageia, either, as this provision allows
companies to make confidential modifications of GPL software for their
own exclusive use, or to commission others to do so for them.
Note that as Romain says, it generally would be in the interest of third
parties to contribute back changes to Mageia, particularly bug fixes.
Also note that support doesn't necessarily involve changes to GPL
covered code.
There could be no coding involved. The coding could be not an integral
part of the GPL code. Or the code could link to a LGPL library, and
thus not be restricted.
Personally, I've done a lot of support covered by these situations.
In short, there would be no problem for Mageia to maintain a list of
third parties wanting to do commercial support, as long as Mageia is not
a party to such transactions.
- André
