Here is a mail i received:
/Hello Jean-Pierre,
We are quite impressed with Kicad software. Congratulations and many
thanks for creating this tool.
We are a PCB design and manufacuting company: please see our website:
www.protoexpress.com <http://www.protoexpress.com/> .
We would like to use Kicad engine ( sourcecode) in a PCB design
workbench that we plan to customize for our manufacturing facility and
available on our website for general PCB designers.
We would like to know that it is OK with you.
Let us know your views.
Thanks and best regards
Atar Mittal
Sierra Proto Express
PCB Design Express Division
1098 West Evelyn Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
Tel: 408-731-2550
/
This is not the first request.
Until now my answer was:
Kicad is under GPL license. You can use the code source as long as you
comply with the GPL license.
But now some (many ?) pieces of codes are written by active contributors.
So i need yours thoughts about this.
Of course this message is for active contributors.
--
Jean-Pierre CHARRAS
Jean-Pierre,
SoftPLC Corp has contributed over 7,000 lines of code just *in the last
month alone*. Previous to that, it has contributed many many hundreds
of lines of code, concepts, and project direction. So SoftPLC Corp. is
clearly a significant owner in this code. We normally bill customers
at $75 to $200 per hour. So by any measure the company has invested
many many tens of thousands of dollars into the project.
Maybe in return, one of the things that Sierra could do for SoftPLC
Corporation is to make prototype boards at no cost?
In any case, the moment Sierra were to *distribute* any code, it trips
the provision in the GPL which says they MUST make the [modified] source
code available. Therefore, the next decision is how do they plan to do
that? And why should that differ from them simply sharing our
repository and making those changes available there? This last
question is not rhetorical, it is a serious question.
They can also fund changes they want and let us do them on contract.
If a programmer gets paid somewhere, it might as well be one that is
familiar with the code.
I am *really getting raw* about working for free on this thing, and I do
not want somebody to walk off into the sunset with the fruit of our labor.
So to summarize, they can:
1) honor the GPL, and contribute their new code to our repository,
either in trunk or a branch.
2) honor the GPL, and do a fork, creating their own online repository
where all the new code can be available at any moment.
3) honor the GPL, and hire us to do the work.
4) honor the GPL, and pay us in free boards for support and future
enhancements.
Once a piece of software is GPL'ed, I suppose it can be forked by its
owners (only), to a non-GPL-ed status. But as that ownership is
fragmented, this becomes increasingly difficult to pull off legally
without offending a dissenting owner. Therefore you would need
unanimous agreement among all owners. So I don't list any options
beyond 1) to 4) above. That does not mean I have thought of everything
however.
Dick Hollenbeck
SoftPLC Corporation
http://softplc.com
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