Licensing question

[progger]

So, i was wondering how the  PECompact student and shareware licenses interact with the GPL.

When i distribute an executable under the terms of the GPL, i cannot prevent anyone from redistributing it for a fee, or even wrapping it in a box and selling that.

If said executable was compressed with PECompact, would this violate the student or shareware licenses, or do the distribution constraints only apply to me, as the one who actually used PECompact to compress the executable?

[Jeremy Collake]

That's a good question.

I tried to formulate a position on this matter and it became quite convoluted, so I've decided to take this stance:

For ALL projects released under the GPL or LGPL (any version) PECompact may freely be used, even if the software is a commercial product that consumers pay money for. Since these projects are open source, I'll recognize that contribution to the greater good and reward it with free PECompact use. That said, I still encourage GPL/LGPL developers to buy a shareware license, or commerical license if they can afford it -- but only as a gesture of support for PECompact, not because they are required to.

Any company using this exclusion, then found violating the GPL/LGPL by not distributing their whole and current source, will be required to buy a PECompact license.

I will make mention of this on the licensing page. Other open source licenses this will apply to as well.