[mythtv] Licensing issues

[Paul Huff]

Actually, you sold it for $100M, but thats besides the point, lol. My plan
is to get this as intuitive and basic as possible (as inspired by my
father-in-law who's frustrated with his current expensive and complicated
setup) so that anyone, techie or not, can use it without ever needing a
manual or being coached. I live in a rather wealthy area where people drop
thousands of dollars on difficult and complicated "high-tech" high confusion
setups. If I can give them something easy, consolidated, intuitive as well
as "high-tech" and new...they'd eat it up. And I'd have fun in the meantime.
I have no plans on going big with this...just some joe schmo setting up
systems in his local metropolitan area. $900-1500 for the parts and whatever
I wanna charge for the setup and markup equals a nice weekend profit. So ya
I guess I can use the system with the software (modified as it may be) and
if someone wants the source they're more than welcome to have it. No one who
knows what to do with it would be paying me for this anyway, lol.

Paul

On 11/17/05, Michael T. Dean <mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:
>
> Johnathon Meichtry wrote:
>
> > I say good luck and I hope you can turn it into a real money making
> > venture. The more commercial organisations selling and shrinkwrapping
> > MythTV the better. In terms of evolution and development it is only
> > early days but if major companies like Hauppauge etc. can ship
> > media/video players and not provide updates thereafter then I can't
> > see why you couldn't do the same with MythTV - as long as it works as
> > advertised and the consumer is getting value for money what does it
> > matter.
> >
> > In terms of LGPL and GPL licensing there is no reason why you cannot
> > make money from distributing a product containg LGPL and GPL. My case
> > in point are the million of media players and STB's being shipped by
> > retailers and manufactuers. For example Yahoo Broadband TV in Japan,
> > their STB runs Open Source embedded linux with all the various
> > trappings and utilities/apps with their HTML UI. The irony is that if
> > you call them up and ask them for a copy of the source (which is a
> > requirement under GPL) they will tell you to take a walk and say it's
> > developed in-house and confidential.
>
> That part would be against the license agreement. If they distribute a
> product containing GPL'ed code, they must make the code--and changes to
> the code--available free of charge to anyone who purchased a "binary"
> version of the software.
>
> However, you're right about the fact that you can sell GPL'ed software.
> (Why do people think it's against the license agreement to sell GPL
> software? It's not freeware...) The only requirement is that you then
> make the source available to the people who buy it. So, if I made a
> GPL'ed app and sold it for $100,000,000, I'm not breaking the GPL. Of
> course, the guy who bought the app would ask for the source (which I'd
> have to provide free of charge) and start distributing the same app for
> much less (perhaps even free--and he's fully within his GPL rights to
> redistribute for free or for some charge)--at which point nobody would
> be crazy enough to pay my $1M price tag. However, since I found someone
> to pay $1M, I don't care as I'm sitting back on the beach sipping my
> margarita... ;)
>
> See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html .
>
> Mike
>
>
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