Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Software w/ Source for Sale?

Posted by Cliff on from the one-step-away-from-open-source dept.

frambooz asks: "As the GNU public license (amongst others) describes, you can make software that is free (as in freedom), but you don't have to make it *free* (as in free beer). I'm wondering if industry officials are aware of this fact, however. Do you know of any software packages that are Open Source, but still require you to purchase them? Did you ever work on such a project as a programmer yourself? If so, how did the development differ from a free(dom)/free(beer) Open Source application?"

2 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. GNU Emacs by gorre · · Score: 3, Informative

    The earliest example of selling free software is probably RMS selling tapes of GNU Emacs for $150 a tape. He says he sold 8-10 tapes a month which generated enough cash for him to live off.

    --
    "Madness is something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule." -- Nietzsche
  2. Re:Redhat EL 3? by dtfinch · · Score: 3, Informative

    You can rebuild a complete RHEL3 (minus the few bits of proprietary stuff I haven't noticed yet) from the public source, so long as you change the name and remove any Red Hat trademarks.

    Some RHEL3 based distributions:
    http://www.centos.org/
    http://whiteboxlinux.org/
    http://taolinux.org/