Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again)
To   : comp.programming
From : Juha Laiho
Date : Wed Aug 24 2005 07:30 pm

"Joe Butler" <ffffh.no.spam@hotmail-spammers-paradise.com> said:
>But, if you are selling a £30 application, then any competitor that wants
>the source would simply purchase your app as a way to get many thousand's of
>hours worth of development work at a reduced price.

Ok. Suppose this competitor releases an enhanced version for £35. Or
£25, for that matter. What do the other competitors then do? They,
of course, byu a copy, and make the request (granted by GPL) to get
the source for the enhanced version. And GPL even requires the source
to be in a common machine-readable format, so bad-quality photocopy of
the listing will not do.

GPL-like licenses would, if they were widely accepted, be a drastic
change to the economy. It'd be no longer possible to place huge
price tags of selling copies of programs. Those who are happy with
"current functionality" could more or less be freeloaders. Only
implementing corrections/functional changes would need money (in
terms of paying the developers doing the changes). While this would
flatten the ecosystem around software quite a lot, I still see
a place for companies -- there's a limit on how large piece of
software a single person can master. So, to get a support for
a program of any significant size, you'd more or less need
a company with people intimately knowledgeable of each aspect
of the software. Again, price of software moving from selling
copies to selling support and other services. To support the
viability of this, there seems to be already some companies
generating their revenue just by selling support to open-source
software. Also, there are some big players in the field,
complementing their IT service portfolio by selling various
open-source related services.
-- 
Wolf  a.k.a.  Juha Laiho     Espoo, Finland
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"...cancel my subscription to the resurrection!" (Jim Morrison)

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