License issue

[panosalevropoulos]

Hello,

I am Panos Alevropoulos, a member of the Free Software Foundation's Licensing and Compliance Lab 0. We are glad to see that SVision 1 is under the GPLv3, a software license carefully crafted to protect the freedom of users.

However, you have also added this clause: "SVision is free for non-commercial use by academic, government, and non-profit/not-for-profit institutions." Though we sympathize with your desire to not have your program exploited for commercial use, we would like to better understand your rationale for doing so and have included the following comments for your consideration.

The GPLv3 and a clause for non-commercial use are two contradictory licensing statements. The GPLv3 explicitly allows selling copies of the underlying program. According to section 4 of the license: "You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee." 2

Commercial use of the program is permitted by the GPLv3 because free software means that software should respect the four essential freedoms. The first freedom (freedom 0) provides that users should be free "to run the program as [they] wish, for any purpose". 4 "Any purpose" should include commercial use, and for this reason the GPLv3 does not restrict it. In any other case that a program restricts commercial use, it is effectively nonfree. 5

To add to the incompatibility described above, the "commercial" restriction is unenforceable because it is considered a "further restriction" under section 7: "All other non-permissive additional terms are considered 'further restrictions' within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term." 6 In other words, anyone may remove a nonfree restriction.

Apart from licensing ambiguity, contradictory use of the GPL spreads confusion to the public in regard to the real purpose of the license. If possible, you should also communicate the importance of user freedom in software, especially in the context of academic research.

The best and most straightforward solution is to simply remove the clause that restricts commercial use. This should also be reflected in published articles such as this: 7

We are posting these comments here to also let other people know of this licensing issue. We are here to help free software developers apply licenses correctly, so please let us know if you have any questions.