Slashdot Mirror
Commercializing Open Source Software
CowboyRobot writes "Michael Karels, system architect for BSD 4.3 and 4.4, has an article on ACM Queue about the challenges in trying to make money from open source software. From the article: 'As users of the software, open source contributors have certain common interests in making the software stable and usable.' but 'When additions require modifications to the base system, there may be resistance to incorporating the changes.'"
Anecdotal evidence: I was involved in a proprietary project where we were using a GPL app (ezsetup). As part of creating a Windows CE installer, it links a GPL'd self extractor stub against your application in a single exe. We were uncomfortable with this and offered the author money for a non-GPL binary license, i.e. just a license to use a non-GPL version of the exe, not any rights over the source.
He refused.
More specifically, he couldn't understand our problem. "You're OK to use it under the GPL," he said, clearly puzzled. Well, sure, until he, or his widow, or estate, sold the rights to SCO or Generic EvilCorp or Mattel and they started asking why everyone using it wasn't GPL licensing their "derivative versions". We simply could not make him understand that we'd rather pay him money than dilute our IP portfolio by taking the risk.
The outcome was that we wrote our own app, and ezsetup guy didn't get any reward for his efforts. Perhaps that's unusual, but it gave me a very bad impression of the GPL developers. He put principle over pragmatism, which would be a fine thing if his principle wasn't blinding him to the problems with the license that he was putting so much faith in. Sad.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.