Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 4 Jan 2003 23:22:44 -0200 (BRST) | From | Rik van Riel <> | Subject | Re: Gauntlet Set NOW! |
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On Sat, 4 Jan 2003, Richard Stallman wrote:
> I would rather look for constructive alternatives than just criticize. > In such a situation, I would look for a way to make the program free.
> If there is no easy way to make the same program free, there may be a > harder way.
There is of course the business model used by the ghostscript people, used by tytso when he made resize2fs and also used by Andre Hedrick:
1) write the software, sell it for a profit for some period of time (eg. 18 months)
2) after that, release the program and its source code
To the copyright holder, this has all the benefits of a strictly copyrighted work, ie. funding. It also has the additional benefit of having free software out there that lags close enough to your commercial program that a competitor has no chance of entering the market with a non-free product of mediocre quality.
To the free software community, it has the benefits of free software becoming available at a higher speed than what would have happened without any funding at all.
Of course, the copyright holder has to choose a license like the GPL when releasing the software as open source, since otherwise the competitors would be able to use the older version as a basis to develop their commercial product from.
To me, this looks like a win/win situation and I hope more companies will choose this business model.
regards,
Rik -- Bravely reimplemented by the knights who say "NIH". http://www.surriel.com/ http://guru.conectiva.com/ Current spamtrap: <a href=mailto:"october@surriel.com">october@surriel.com</a> - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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