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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.
TheKompany's URL
With "Public Domain"?
It's still a copyright(?) license, just not nearly as restrictive as a traditional license.
I'm all for reasonably priced software, but giving it away for free often isn't.
There doesn't appears to be anything in the essay that suggests that "GPL doesn't work for software companies producing graphical and end-user friendly stuff." It *does* note -- and this is no shock to any of us -- that GPL is inappropriate for commercial software, but "graphical and end-user friendly stuff [sic]" isn't a complete subset of the former.
-Baka!
I had RMS come to me on this product to make sure we weren't violating the GPL, and he admitted that we were not, but in the course of the conversation he proceeded to project onto the KDE project aspects of theKompany in a totally inappropriate fashion and was very negative about KDE in this regard.
He talked to RMS; always best avoided, at least without shielding. That's enough to throw anyone off their game.
THe Gardener
--
While I agree with the author that it's hard to sell an Open Source only project, I'm really curious to see how Covalent does selling Apache web server management systems. They take a good open source engine and add something of value, a good user interface for doing complicated tasks, to it before selling it. Perhaps that's a better business model than trying to sell GPL'ed software directly?
ESR says in Cathedral and the Bazaar, if you are a company who's primary business it writing and selling software, then GPL isn't going to be your bag. That's ANY software. You may write software an give it away hoping to sell some other service on top... in which case your company's primary product wouldn't be software would it?
However, if your company sells widgets and you maintain an in house software development team to manage your process/accounting software, then you are the perfect candidate for GPL. Outsource your software to the world and get more code review, more features, and more man hours spent on the product at a lower price... then you can dedicate yourself to what you do best, making widgets instead of overhead (software development).
Other GUI and cool software maintained strictly as software under the GPL is done for fun not profit.
It isn't rocket science.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
A programmer who use the GPL see it as a tool for distributing code that he wants to write. The programmer knows that no one will be able to do more with the software than he can. Since he doesn't care about commercial concepts like support and ease-of-use, the GPL allows him to do only what he wants to do with the code, and doesn't give him any incentive to do more. 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!"?
Frankly, I like the idea. Without the GPL, a lot of programmers who don't want to worry about support and end users constantly bugging them for new features would never have released their programs at all.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Red Hat does not own Linux, so it cannot charge for each copy it puts out in the way that Microsoft charges for Windows or Sun charges for Solaris.
"The only way we can make money in this business is in support," Mr Hoffmann told BBC News Online.
"That ranges from training down to system maintenance, deployment and integration with other applications.
"We focus on those customers who are able to pay the bill - the enterprises," he said.
Give me a company that sells support over one that sells software any day. The moment you put software in a box, its most important component -- the ability to be adapted and updated for security fixes and feature enhancements -- dies. Anyway, which is more successful, "theKompany" or RedHat?
There's also an interesting analysis on LinuxToday of theKompany's tactics and how they allegedly intentionally damage Free Software. Although I wouldn't take all the accusations at face value, there's certainly something worrying about the claims.
To Eat!
Contribute Free Software
The Kompany manages both, and yet people are getting all hot and bothered about the fact that they have software that you must pay for if you want it.
As long as the Kompany keeps making contributions to Free Software - they are alright by me.
Let's judge the Kompay an their efectivness in giving Free Software. If they happen to make a buck on the side, good! That money helps them make more Free Software.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Does the GPL allow me to charge a fee for downloading the program from my site?
It's funny that people assume downloading from a company costs nothing. I can only guess that these are people who are unaware that most companies pay for whatever bandwidth they use, as opposed to the all-you-can-drink type access you get from home/dorm internet access.
- vin
Head down, go to sleep to the rhythm of the war drums...
Gawd, I wish every GPL advocate really understood the significance of this statement. If you give the software away and sell support, then the only way you make money is by getting enough people to pay for support. Logically, the more valuable the support is, the more likely people will pay for it. In other words, people will only pay for support if they need it. So what kind of support could a user want?
- New features or other code modifications, like customizations specific to your company
- Outsourcing of installation or deployment. That is, instead of installing the software on every computer in your company, you hire them to do it for you.
- Help with using the product itself.
Let's evaluate the problems with these on a case-by-case basis:- Because the user has access to the source code, it's possible for him to make the modifications himself. In fact, the GPL encourages this. So chances are, he won't pay someone else to do it.
- Only large corporations will be interested in this, and only if the corporation has an insufficient internal IT staff to do the job itself.
- The end-user will only pay for help using the program if he can't figure it out himself. However, the easier the software is to use, the less help the user will need. That's what the term "ease-of-use" is all about. So the developer has an incentive to make the software hard to use, to improve the likelihood that the customer will pay for support. In other words, the pay-for-support-only model is completely contrary to making the software easy to use! The ramifications of this are astounding. It results in a business model that encourages making the product difficult to use, but not too difficult that people won't use it.
The kicker is that because the revenue model is so weak, the company will charge more for support than if it also sold the software.Although I hate Microsoft as much as anyone else (I'm an OS/2 user, so I've been hating them longer than most Slashdot readers have), they have been trying to explain these issues to everyone. Of course, in typical Microsoftian style, all they end up doing is making themselves look stupid to anyone who isn't computer illiterate.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
GPL is a license chosen by authors who want their source code to be available and to remain available. The question is, why should they have chosen GPL for this product? If they are the sole author of their product, then GPL is simply a really poor choice for what they wanted to achieve and they should simply release under a different license. In this case, he may have a point about GPL activists.
If this product is a derivative work, then they were forced to use GPL. In that case, charging high reproduction fees to create a barrier to users (as Mr. Gordon frankly admits he is doing) is a violation at the very least of the spirit of GPL, if not a legal violation. It breaks the understanding under which he was granted the right to use the original work by the original authors. In this case he has no right to complain about people attempting to find clever ways to get their hands on source code without paying, since he would be doing exactly the same thing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This man has a very skewed idea of what's going on here. He says that he gets regular complaints that they don't release the code, and then tries to jump from there to the idea that using the GPL has hurt them.
:-/
Um... sorry guy, but Microsoft gets this complaint EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR. Hell, they get that from much larger and more influential commers than poor little RMS.
As for RMS, if I had a dime for everyone who had a troubling conversation with RMS, I'd probably be providing dimes to the US Treasury... they would be out. RMS is a fanatic. This is neither good nor bad, really. He has done a lot of good because he cares a heck of a lot more than he should. He's also refused to back down from some ideas which are pathalogically idealistic, and that has caused any number of problems. In the end, I think we should all reality-check Open Source against RMS just to keep that perspective, but he should never be thought of as the ultimate voice of anything (including, oddly, his GPL).
The GPL is an amazingly good tool for protecting free software AS free software. If that's not your goal, you probably chose the wrong license
Sorry man.
You can charge as much as you want for GPL software no matter where you got it from. However, if someone you sold a binary-only copy to comes asking for the source code then you have to make it available to them for a reasonable cost of media and distrobution only. You can't sell GPL software for $19.95 and then say source will cost an additional million dollars (effectively making the software closed source.)
The clincher is you can't stop someone you sold a copy to from giving it away for no cost.
burris
This is the reason that the price of GPL software tends to zero.
No, you don't get it. Neither do I. In fact, nobody could get it by reading the article, because he simply doesn't explain what he means by "charging for the source."
If he means, "You don't get our GPL'ed product with source until you pay us $50," that's perfectly OK. If he means, "You get the binary for $50, and the source will cost you $5000 extra," then that's not okay under the GPL.
In the latter case, Windows XP perfectly and completely fulfills the terms of the GPL. After all, if you were able to scrape together $300 billion, I'm sure Bill Gates would be more than happy to sell you a copy of the source code with unlimited distribution rights. And then come over to wax your Ferarri.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
It isn't FUD whatsoever : To use GPLd code you might apply the GPL license to your own code as well.
Incorrect. If all you want to do is use the code, you are under no obligation to give anyone the source code. You can even modify the source to fit whatever needs you might need and nobody can force you to release those changes. It's only when you try to distribute your modified version of the program that you are also forced to include the source code.
Instead it's claiming ownership over derived works as well.
As our current copyright laws already enforce...
The real FUD is the perpetual claims of GPLers that somehow they would be deprived of their code is someone else used it in a commercial app.
You don't get it. What we are being deprived of are the improvements to our code, which is all we are really asking for in return for the use of our code.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!