Am 07.10.2009 um 00:18 schrieb Rudi Ahlers:
Hi all,
We are busy developing some software (some is web based, others not)
Licenses are only about the source-access and how contribution/ deviations are licensed.
You can charge any amount you want for your GPL'ed stuff - but the source must be available for reasonable cost.
So, if one of your licensees redistributes a copy for free, that's perfectly legal (for GPL).
Charging for PHP-stuff has always been very difficult. Some use IONCUBE encoder etc.
I don't know if charging for support actually makes a good business- model. You need a lot of contracts for that.
BSD-licenses carry a lot less burden - but of course you can't just take a GPL'ed piece of code and re-distribute it with a BSD-licence. If your free product is GPL'ed and your commercial product is a derivative of that, it will also be licensed (well, need to be licensed) as GPL - if you give it away to somebody. If you keep it inhouse, nobody cares and nobody has a right to see the derivated source, just because it exists).
You should really enlist the help of a law-professional in this field - the licensing-minefield has gotten more and more difficult to navigate in recent years. This is especially relevant in cases where you want to have "dual- licensed" stuff (as you mentioned).
Rainer