OpenDCL and commercial applications

[agarsil2002]

Dear friends,

I have involved in the development of an application related to the structural analysis and we have in mind to commercialise it in a short future.

For that, we have developed a graphical user interface for AutoCAD, based on OpenDCL, in which the user carries out the pre-processing stage, introducing the geometry and properties of the elements that compose the structure, the external actions applied, and so on.

Having in mind that OpenDCL has a GNU GPL license, must our application own a GNU GPL license as well? Can our software competitors distribute our application? Which should be the most appropriate license for our code?

Thank you very much for your help.

Regards.

[owenwengerd]

You can use any license you want for your own application.  If you were to modify OpenDCL or distribute its source code, then you would need to distribute it under a GPL license.

I'm not sure that it's legally required, but I would advise that you mention OpenDCL in your license agreement and include the copyright notice (Copyright 2009 OpenDCL Consortium) to ensure that your customers know what it is.

[BazzaCAD]

Hi agarsil2002,
A little off topic, but we'd love to see some screen shots of your app when it's done.
And since I work for a Structural Engineering firm I'd love to test it out too.