Re: Linux/Mozilla related Short-Term Contract

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

Stephen J. Turnball (turnbull@example.com) wrote:

Stephen> No.  It must be distributed, or the clause does not apply.  If it

I'm not so sure.  The specific wording is "to anyone to whom you made
an Executable version available."  It doesn't say "anyone who doesn't
work for you, or anyone except those you made to sign an NDA."  It
just says "anyone."  

It's not my intentions that matter, really.  What matters is how
narrowly AOL interprets that clause of the license, and whether or
not they would want to enforce it in court.  If they did, I'd
not want to be on the receiving end of the amount of legal firepower
they could throw at it to make it stick.

But even if you could squeeze through that loophole by keeping
it as a purely in-house distribution and could get away with not
providing source to your staff other than developers, you would
need a really large amount of employees using it to make it worth
the development cost.  So it makes more sense as a product that
you distribute to the public for a fee, but then you are 
definitely locked into making the source available.  The license
is most clear about that.  That doesn't mean you couldn't
still make money on it, but you do have to find the right
business model and target audience.

Jonathan