Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again) and bounty system
To   : comp.programming
From : Tatu Portin
Date : Fri Aug 26 2005 05:46 pm

Juha Laiho wrote:
> "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.

This is a valid view. There is already demand for additional program 
features from people that can't program themselves. Some programmers are 
already frustrated by feature requests they cannot fullfill because of 
limited time and money they can spend on a project.

Topic has been discussed and solution given in this comic:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20050814

.