Dear Flight Gear Forum Readers,

 

If a developer designs an aircraft or scenery for Flight Gear be it an airport or an area, can that developer charge real money for that addon or is the platform designed so charging money could never work in practice?

 

Regards;

 

Fritz

Currently they only integrate GPL stuff. I wanted a different license for my project but was rejected. Hence I can use whatever I want, but unless it's GPL it won't be included. So no problem to create a payware aircraft addon and to put that on your server or wherever. You could even use for ex. a avionics folder within and have/keep that GPL licensed or even better use such directly from FG without including.

If I'm wrong let me know...I'm not a lawyer.

The big problem you would have if you had to use a GPL license, is the same low life entities, that copied and profitized Flight Gear, under the terms of GPL, could do the same with your addon, and there would be little you could do to prevent it!

Yes, that's exactly why I'm hesitating to use the GPL license.

Hi,

 

I'm one of the FG developers, and have done commercial work with FG in the past, so am quite familiar with GPL issues.

 

Basically, if you release your code under the GPL anyone receiving it is free to redistribute it for free. So, if you were (say) to create a GPL aircraft and sell it, you wouldn't be able to stop the buyer from handing it out to anyone.

 

However, there's no requirement that your work is GPL, provided it doesn't use any GPL code itself. So you could create non-GPL aircraft or scenery and sell it as you wish. There are a couple of considerations however:

1) Most FG aircraft use the Nasal scripting language which is part of FG. You'd need to either use another (external) scripting language, or release the Nasal code under the GPL.

2) The FG formats are very open - for example there's extensive use of XML. You wouldn't be able to protect your IP through obscurity. I'm also not sure how license keys would work

3) I think the market is pretty small at present.

 

Regarding hesitating to use the GPL license for fear of work being sold by others - I think that horse has bolted. The various offerings of FG for sale are all now using versions many years old. They have no incentive to use the latest FG given their business model. I'd also point out that FG only exists due to the GPL.

 

 

-Stuart