Selling Free Software
Selling Software under the BSD license is permissible and commercial use of the project is part of the intent of the license.
The Free Software Foundation encourages selling free software. As the Foundation has written, "Distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. Don't waste it!". For example the GNU GPL that is the Free Software Foundation's license states that " may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee."
It is a common misbelief however that consumers shouldn't or aren't allowed to redistribute software under the GPL for profit, and some opposing parties state such notions. For example Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stated in 2001 that "Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source." When you distribute software under the GPL, you must provide the source code as well and must allow others to distribute it. Yet there are large companies, e.g. Red Hat and IBM, which succeed in doing it.
Read more about this topic: Free Software
Famous quotes containing the words selling and/or free:
“You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don’t know, you are now selling yourselves to somebody else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God’s curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wifes and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrel corporation.”
—Anthony Henley (d. 1745)
“If I had not come to America, where I felt free to formulate tentatively insights at which I had empathically arrived, I would have accomplished very little. I would never have begun to publish, to teach, to undertake research. Because if one does not find an assenting echo to one’s ideas, if one is passed over, as I was in Vienna, then one cannot create. To create, after all, is to believe that what one says will count.”
—Margaret S. Mahler (1897–1985)