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.

Comments

Wrong URL

[BoyPlankton]

TheKompany's URL

Um, no....

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Well, There's Your Problem

[The Gardener]

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

Re:Well, There's Your Problem

[renehollan]

Having dealt with RMS with regard to the use of GPL software in a commercial environment, I don't find his "policing" of the GPL unreasonable.

There are a few sticky issues (like pre-release distribution of binaries only to outside contractors because you don't yet have a clean source release mechanism), but with proper planning, even these can be overcome.

As for selling GPL source, this is permitted, though I thought that there was some cap on price, based on reasonable distribution expenses (media, shipping, overhead, etc.)

Covalent and Apache

[agentZ]

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?

Should be Any Company that Sells Software

[Uggy]

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.

Re:So Why Use It

[LordNimon]

The people who choose the GPL for their software do so because they don't care about making money but they don't want anyone else to make money. The software is done on the programmer's free time as a hobby, and the GPL allows others to use his work without giving them to opportunity to make money from it.

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.

Why selling support doesn't work

[LordNimon]

but they should only really need support if our software is hard to use or poorly designed

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?

1. New features or other code modifications, like customizations specific to your company
2. 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.
3. Help with using the product itself.

Let's evaluate the problems with these on a case-by-case basis:

1. 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.
2. Only large corporations will be interested in this, and only if the corporation has an insufficient internal IT staff to do the job itself.
3. 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.

So -- he chose the wrong license.

[hey!]

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.

Fork It

[sdowney]

If someone is really hot and bothered by Shawn's position on his software, then pay him for it, take the source, and put it on SourceForge. GPL gives you the absolute right to do so.

This is the reason that the price of GPL software tends to zero.