Note that you only have the right to sell your code. If you have contributions of others in there, you need to get their consent.

You are correct sir. However if applying that to the GNU part then permissions are automatically granted under the licence so long as the documentation is crediting it. As to other parties definitely, unless it is under one organisation umbrella in which case the company owns the license and not the employees.

Edit: This advice fails to take into account 3rd party contributions under the GPL utilised - spoken of later in the thread

It is my personal project and the codes were written just by me. Although there were some volunteers testers and documentation writers that helped me on the project. So does it make anything different?

I am going to assume you did not take out a patent then...if you did let me know as it would be relevant to the GNU issue.

Volunteer testers would hold no rights persay over your code unless you gave them rights.

Document writers - if you paid them they have no claim - if they volunteered then possibly they might have a claim but not with respect to your coding - only with regard a copyright of their documentation work which I am assuming was consigned to you, unless of course you accorded them rights.

I would suggest that for future "volunteer" situations you have a simple contract that acknowledges them as donating their work and holding no right to claim on the basis of this donation.



Meh: Simon types faster than I do

Use Frob's advice below +1

Thanks both of you for the explanations. So, I guess I will just negotiate with the company about selling them the source codes with GPL exceptions. Thanks again!

Any suggestion how to price it?

Both of these are excellent questions for a business lawyer.

You absolutely should have a lawyer help you with the negotiations. That is what they do. They work with contracts in exactly the same way a programmer works with code.

Business lawyers are also very experienced at coming up with valuations for products. They know what source code is selling for, how much to ask, and how much to accept.


If you don't have a lawyer you may discover that you signed a contract written entirely in their favor that ends up leaving you exposed to all kinds of problems. Topics like IP rights, indemnity, severability, and venues are all very important and you are likely to get some of them wrong unless you have help from a lawyer who understands it.

Just like a non-programmer trying to write complex source code, a non-lawyer trying to write a contract is likely to end up with serious problems.

The cost of a lawyer is pretty cheap; in my area it is about $150/hr. Compare that with the potential cost of a bad contract, which through indemnity clauses and other problems could potentially hold you liable for a fortune in a worst-case scenario.