[Nix-dev] Packaging free software that costs money

[Kevin Cox]

On 06/07/16 09:25, Bjørn Forsman wrote:
> On 6 July 2016 at 14:19, Profpatsch <mail at profpatsch.de> wrote:
>
> But that still looks like opt-in payment. I'm sure Ardour users
> already know that upstream wants money for it, even without the above
> mechanism. (But I guess if a lot of upstreams do this it'd be more
> difficult to track manually, and we'd need a mechanism.)
> 
> If upstream *really require* money, the above method seems
> insufficient, IMHO. I'm starting to think about proprietary programs
> now, and how you often can get the software but it doesn't work
> without a license key. The key can be stored in $HOME and don't have
> to have anything to do with the Nix expression that built (or just
> downloaded) the software.
> 

IIUC you can't "really require" money for a GPL program. You can charge
for the distribution or for binaries or whatever you like, but nothing
is stopping others from building and distributing the program for no
charge (or even taking the money themselves) this is part of the freedom
offered by the license.

That being said I think it is nice to encourage these payments, and I
think an "honour system" is enough for Nix. (again the "problem" with
free software is you can only try so hard or the user will just comment
out the payment check and recompile themselves)

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