question on licensing

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romeo1
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First name: mario
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question on licensing

#1 Post by romeo1 » 2008-12-22 00:43

Hi All
I am reading the FAQ and was just confrming that filezilla can be installed on as many pc's i want, i work in a government department and we package up software and deploy using active directory... is this ok to package and push out to a number of users?, Is there anything i need to know about doing so
your help would be much apprieciated.

thanks all

da chicken
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Joined: 2005-11-02 06:41

Re: question on licensing

#2 Post by da chicken » 2008-12-22 03:09

Yes, you can distribute the client to your entire network. There is no fee for the software.

FileZilla is published under the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL).

From an IT perspective, there is no licensing fee, no distribution fee, and you have complete access to the source code (which is generally useless to 99% of IT departments IMX, but you do have it). However, there are no support contracts and no guaranteed level of service, either. IMX, management dislikes that caveat. If the shit hits the fan and FileZilla gets blamed, the buck is going to stop at you (or, management fears, with management). No warranty is expressed, implied, or available (which isn't uncommon even for commercial software). Some GPL software has support contracts available (for example, SuSE Linux or Red Hat Linux) but FileZilla in and of itself does not.

The basic limitation of the GPL is that if you make your own changes to the source code, then you must distribute the changes to that source code when you distribute the binary. The GPL is, effectively, a distribution license only. There is no end user agreement per se. Users are granted full rights to do with the code and the binary whatever you want. BUT if you change it, you have to distribute those changes. Although even then, if you only distribute the changed version internally, you only need to publish the changes internally. Google, for example, uses the MySQL database which is (partially) distributed under the GPL. Google has some very complex additions to indexing that they have made, but since they don't distribute those changes outside of their company, they don't have to distribute the code changes either.

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