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

Sergey Gromov snake.scaly at gmail.com
Sun Mar 29 11:47:01 PDT 2009


Sun, 29 Mar 2009 09:29:33 +0200, "Jérôme M. Berger" wrote:

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> Sergey Gromov wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> 	Ask RedHat, or any of the increasingly large number of companies
> that *do* make money on free, as in libre, software. Basically, you
> make your customers pay for specific developments and
> customizations. Once the software is released you still get paid for
> tech support and maintenance.

Yeah, sure.  How much support a single-player game needs?  Or a
3D-modeling tool?  I agree with Nick: to make a profit on support you
must create something unusable in the first place, and then charge money
for fixing it.

I agree that support is sometimes a valid business model, like when you
create customized Linux kernels for various hardware and requirements.
But it's definitely not universal enough to apply to every software
created out there.



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