Eric S. Raymond on GPL and BSD licenses. & Microsoft coming to Linux

Sergey Gromov snake.scaly at gmail.com
Sat Mar 28 15:47:35 PDT 2009


Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:38:45 +0300, Yigal Chripun wrote:

> When you buy 
> a car you are free to look under the hood and the same should apply to 
> software. sure, the manufacturer can and probably should void any 
> warranty if you mess with the internals of its product, but they 
> shouldn't prevent you access to those internals.

I hear automotive analogies here and there as "explanations" why open
source is good.  But automotive does not apply.

Yes you can buy Ford, modify it and sell it at a higher price.  But you
cannot put Ford out of business this way because you must start from
scratch on every single car you modify and that's a significant amount
of work.  And if you actually try to manufacture copies of Ford cars
you'll be sued for patent infringement.

Now, how would you make money on free, as in libre, software?  How would
you make a free, single-player RPG and still stay in business?  All you
can under GPL is take payment for distribution, as long as nobody else
starts to distribute it for free.  This means giving your hard work for
free, as in gratis, not business.



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