Contribution agreements (Re: [sldev] What is the point offirstlook and giving feedback to LL)

[Lawson English]

Richard M Stallman wrote:
Rob L wrote:
>     Another elephant (scenario #3):  we do allow license our source code 
>     (with contributions) to third parties under separate license.  The way 
>     we view such deals is that they give us revenue to hire developers that 
>     write more free software.
>
> I designed the criterion specifically with that in mind.  You would be
> able to do that, using contributions under this criterion, provided
> that the version you license out in that way follows the criterion.
> In other words, the free version of the same component should have all
> the features as the version you license out.  If they are in fact the
> same code, as is the case with Qt for instance, the criterion is
> automatically satisfied.
>   

I think this is where I was (perhaps am) confused. As far as I know, the 
commercial license that Electric Sheep has to produce the onrez SL 
viewer for use by CSI-NY allows them to use any GPLed components of the 
LL GPLed viewer that they like. The sticking point, and it just may be 
I'm not reading things well, is that they decided to deliberately 
cripple the functionality of their viewer in order to make it more 
CSI:NY-audience-friendly.

IOW, on THEIR side, they made a marketing decision to leave out 
functions  that are available in the GPL version. They had access to 
them, as far as I know, and decided NOT to use them for the sake of 
simplicity. So the functions were available for the *programmers* to use 
but were not included in the final product that was released.



It is probably just a wording issue that is causing my confusion since 
normally one would assume that the commercially licensed version will 
have MORE features--and it did have NEW ones as well--but the onrez 
commercial licensed viewer also left common features out.


Lawson