My Adventures with the GPL

Being relatively ignorant about 1 1/2 years ago when I embarked upon software development, I did not grasp the significance of a comment was made to me by one of my coders.

We were working on Poingo Email Printer, an app which converts documents to either PDF or JPG formats, then does a few more stunts such as date/time stamping the filename and sending large files via FTP.

He told me that the part of the software which does the actual conversion to PDF was free, an application called Ghostscript.

Free was a word I thought I understood, so I easily agreed.

When marketing time came, and site visits and downloads were numbering in the hundreds, I discovered a new meaning for the word "free".

Guess what, there is a whole world out there which takes "free" software very seriously, and "free" doesn't mean what I thought. It was the "open source" crowd, a vast underground of intelligent developers who write code essentially for free, for the betterment and advancement of free software everywhere. Think Linux, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla and many, many more. Somehow, in very short order, they found my software and its dirty little secret.

The open source community is a refreshing countercultural experience, in stark contrast to the uber-capitalist Microsoft steamroller. These guys actually write for free and, based on brains and discipline, have actually presented a credible threat to Big Bill.

Like it or not, I had to face them and figure out where I stood. The first step was a no-brainer: I immediately pulled the software from the site. The harder step was figuring out what to do next.

I exchanged ideas with two terrific guys. The first, Philip Chinery, wrote PDF Creator, an open source program with similar functionality to Email-Printer. The second, a real gentleman named Miles Jones, President of Artifex Software Inc. oversees the commercial licensing of freely-available Ghostscript.

With their generous assistance, I was able to sort out my options. First, they directed me to the GNU GPL, the GNU Project General Public License. It is worthwhile reading available at www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html.

The first thing I noticed was that it was written in a funny non-legalese language called English, a language poingologists are particularly fond of. You could actually read it without keeping a scorecard of the whereas', wherefors and reverse-double whammys normally found in legal documents.

Next, it made a distinction between free, as in speech, as opposed to free, as in beer. The GPL people care much more about the former, and not very much about the latter. You can actually charge for the service of distributing free software, as long as you pass on to the next guy the same rights you inherited under the GPL.

In other words, make the source code freely available.

So there was my choice. Give away my precious source code, or find another way to make PDFs.
In the next chapter... my choice.


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