OSNews

This is not quite the full story.

If your only license to a piece of software is the GPL, then if you redistribute that code to any other downstream recipient you are indeed required to do so under the same conditions as you yourself received it.

So:
"If I buy a copyrighted program (and rights to distribute) from a programmer friend (source and binary) and modify it and give/sell it to a another friend (binary only), that's ok via copyright law."

Correct. However, please note: this is equally correct for open source and closed source.

"I can't do that under GPL."

Also correct. The GPL license does not grant you permission to re-sell a modified binary-only version of the original.

"I have to give them source, GPL took away my right to distribute the progam how I see fit."

Not correct. It isn't your program, and you have no exclusive rights to it. At best you own a portion of it, and you must negotiate rights with the authors of the original source which you have included.

"Normally under copyright I can do that."

Only if you pay the author for a commercial license. Very often you can do this for source code that is also distributed under the GPL. This is called "dual licensing".

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+%22dual+l...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-licensing

"Is it a big deal, not really. But it is a restriction."

Not necessarily. It is quite often possible to negotiate a commercial license for code that is also distributed under the GPL.

Edited 2009-10-16 00:00 UTC

Actually not really. Your friend would either sell you the copyright to the program, and you're then the copyright owner or he would sell you the program and a licence to distribute/modify. Otherwise you will not be allowed to distribute or modify. And you will have to abide by the licence terms.


Well then your friend would have given you the rights to distribute and modify under the terms of the GPL, so yes you have to abide by those terms. If he sold you the copyright to the program you could do whatever you want if you're the sole copyright owner. You can change the licence for newer versions (obviously not for versions which have already been released as GPL).


If you wrote the program from scratch you can distribute it under any licence you want. If you want to distribute the binaries only you would obviously not choose the GPL, but use a different licence.

Or do you mean the case where you wrote a program from scratch but used some GPL libraries? Then you did not simply write your program from scratch, you used other peoples work so you got to abide by their licence terms.
[snip]