Question about developing a product that will be for sale

Question about developing a product that will be for sale

by Ryan Chadwick -
Number of replies: 1
In a previous thread, some points were raised about the GPL and ways in which you could still develop addons for Moodle which you were able to sell.

I was just wondering if I could get some clarification on this.

If I developed a module that made use of a set of libraries am I able to give the module away for free but charge for the libraries. (I've read the License trying to understand if this is doable but I'm still not sure)

If not, then if I develop a module that calls a separate page (this page doesn't include any moodle code, it just happens to live in the module's directory) which does part of the work is this ok? (ie the module is free but the separate page is not)

I wish for my addon to be as consistent as possible with the existing Moodle UI in the interest of intuitiveness and ease of use however I must be able to charge for it.

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In reply to Ryan Chadwick

Re: Question about developing a product that will be for sale

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
If the module is something useful on its own, and the other code X is something absolutely completely separate and underived from Moodle that simply adds some value when it is installed, then I think that's probably OK to sell X under a different license. it's not great but it's probably allowed.

Otherwise, if the two parts are dependent then you really aren't "giving the module away for free", are you? The module won't achieve its main purpose without the libraries so it'd be pure marketing spin to describe it as free.

What you are really doing there is distributing GPL code mixed with non-GPL code. Which you definitely can't do.

See: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MoneyGuzzlerInc
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