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theKompany's Shawn Gordon On The GPL
replicant_deckard writes "In this short but insightful essay Shawn Gordon, the founder of theKompany, explains why GPL doesn't work for software companies producing graphical and end-user friendly stuff. This reminds us that GPL has so far been useful just for infrastructure-level hacker stuff like operating systems, databases etc. " Of course, it's been used for end user - OpenOffice, GAIM, and other projects.
How many times have you emailed a developer of a GPL'd program for some feature or help, and gotten a reply along the lines of, "You have the source code, you figure it out!"?
Never. Not even once, and I've been on both sides of that conversation, many times. I don't buy your argument that a programmer of GPL'd software has no incentive to support or improve the program beyond what they personally see fit to do. I get a huge kick out of the fact that people use and enjoy my program, and I've made a large number of changes based on user feedback. I think the same can be said for many (if not most) GPL'd programs, including all of KDE.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
From the article:
Look at it this way. I can send 1,000 copies to a distributor who will put it on store shelves around the world. People will walk in, pick it up and buy it. Now let's say that the software was free (as in cost) and I just sell services. Well, now I can't put it on a store shelf and for every customer; I have to go and hunt them down somehow and persuade them to use our free software and then pay us for support -- but they should only really need support if our software is hard to use or poorly designed, which isn't the case or our objective.
Now this is an argument, but he doesn't adress the most common case, namely:
You package the thing with manuals and charge for it (with 30 days free support),
but also provide a free download at your site.
Now send it to the distributor.
This is how most distros work, and Redhat seems to be doing fine. Even I was surprised when I saw SuSE Linux on the shelf at the store Åhlens
(~Walmart, but not cheap) here in Sweden last christmas, that's good market penetration!
But he does have a point: Consumer-oriented products shouldn't need support.
Honestly, the "I sell software" market is just not what it used to be. I think that the internet changed things. Software is now abundant, easy to come by.
Except for games which aren't really 100% software (mix of art and code), the consumer market doesn't exist or will not exist much longer for software-only solutions.
Corporations will always buy software... or will they? For niche applications, I think that proprietary software will always survive, but for generic software, I don't much of a future. As soon as the market is dominated by both free software (GPL and al.) and large corporations such as Microsoft, there isn't much room for growth anymore, not much room for new software companies.
It has been my experience that coders working inside companies that sell code have had very stressful lives recently and this isn't about to go away. Salaries might be high, but requirements are also very though.
So, not only is the market more difficult, but coders have a more stressful life... I just think that a lot of them will eventually switch to companies who make a living off something else (not software) and people who know the market well will not want to invest and start companies in the software industry.
In ten years, you'll have Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, a couple more... and everything else will be free software.
Want to bet?
You pretty much nailed it with that statement. I've written a number of GPL'd programs, my current project being phpShare. I originally wrote it for personal use, but decided that it would be a good idea to give something back to the community, However I didn't want some company just stealing my hard work. The GPL fits that perfectly. I don't use it because of some political notion that all software should be free, but because it's the best fitting licence for my needs. If a company wants to sell my code commercially under a non-gpl licence, I can decide whether to give them the right to use it (possibly for a modest fee), or force them to abide by the GPL's rules.
If I wanted to start my own company and write software commercially, I most likely wouldn't use the GPL. I would probably release various parts of the code because I believe in Open Source, but I do not believe the GPL alone is commercially viable long term. Yes, there are companys that are starting to make a profit selling GPL'd software, but most of the revenue comes from services, not the actual sale of the software.
To sum it all up, the GPL is a great licence that is best suited for "part time" projects. It has proven that the community can come togethor and write some excellent software, BUT it is not the licence-to-end-all-licences. the Unix mantra of the right tool for the job applies here- use the right licence for the job at hand.