Making Money Off Our Go Efforts (was Re: RESPONSE: OpenGo / GNU / GPL Name Confusion)

[Stuart Cracraft <cracraft@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[Following communication is from Richard Stallman.
 --Stuart]

    2. I like sharing source code.  But I also would like to leave open the
    possibility
    of making some money off *our* efforts.

Using the GPL does leave this possibility open.  In fact, there are
businesses that are based on free software.

Beyond that, the GPL does not give permission to make proprietary
versions of your code.  Therefore, if you find a company which is
interested in using your code in a proprietary program, you could sell
them special permission to do this.

I would not do things this way myself.  My goal is to do the utmost
for free software, so when a company asks me for such an exception, I
always say no.  But this is a way of making OpenGo available to the
free software community.  If you want to combine the goals of
developing free software and making money, that is one way to do it.

If you use a license more restrictive than the GPL, that would almost
certainly make the program non-free, and we would have to look
elsewhere for free Go software.