commercial use

[Luke Schierer]

Due to the great many copyright holders, it is entirely infeasible to offer pidgin under any other license, even if I did not know of a few copyright holders who would refuse to go along with the idea, even if we tried.  Pidgin is, for the foreseeable future, offered only under the GPL.

That being said, the GPL's language is quite clear.  Anything that you "integrate" with Pidgin such that the result is a single product must be under the GPL.  Anything that is merely bundled with Pidgin, the way RedHat or Debian ship CDs with software under different licenses, but where the software is not in fact necessarily interdependent, need not be under the GPL.  

So long as you comply with the GPL licensing on Pidign, we have no issue with its use.

Luke


On Jul 9, 2010, at 08:39 EDT, Max J. Pucher wrote:

> Luke,
> 
> thanks for the quick answer. Unfortunately, my corporate clients do not buy open source software yet. We are based on Berkeley DB, but purchased a license luckily before Oracle got hold of it. I have proposed OS to my customers but they say it is a security and support risk they can not afford. We do provide a few components as open source but not the whole system. We would not charge additional for this feature, provide the source and copyright notice to our customers and make Pidgin better known. We would also feed all our expansions and improvements back to you. 
> 
> Would this be sufficient to be considered open source? 
> 
> Freundliche Grüße,
> With my best regards,
> Max J. Pucher
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Am 09.07.2010 um 13:55 schrieb Luke Schierer:
> 
> Pidgin is offered under the GPL.  This means that you can integrate it with your system, so long as you offer the system under the GPL. 
> 
> Luke
> 
> On Jul 9, 2010, at 05:54 EDT, Max J. Pucher wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I am looking for an open source universal chat client to integrate with our system.
>> Does Pidgin offer such a license?
>> 
>> Freundliche Grüße,
>> With my best regards,
>> Max J. Pucher
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
>