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Software w/ Source for Sale?
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?"
Well, that's how the things usually work in the embedded world from the startof the industry. In the embedded programming you do need to customize the purchased packages occasionally, as you switch to different architectures, different chips within the same architectures and so on.
So you buy a software product (TCP/IP stack, or some drivers), and they usually come with the royalty-free source. You cannot resell the product, but you can embed the product in your own system and resell that. The source belongs to the original manufacturer and is free for you to tinker with.
That's kinda the way the things always were in the embedded world, too many people are confusing the GPL and GNU ideology with the concept of having sources on additional CD with the product you purchased.
The Internet lays bare an interesting human trait - that people are willing to pay for a product in a physical form that they could grasp from the ether for free.
Examples: People who bought RedHat in the store for the box, the manual, and the CD, rather than downloading it. Same thing when people buy the PDF version of an online article so they can print it out or just "keep" it - people do this more than you would think.
I think there is real value added by having a physical product, and some of the bigger open source software projects should do this if possible. Not only is it another way to get funding for the project, but it's actually something a lot of people want. Wouldn't you like to have Wikipedia 1.0 sitting over your desk?
How can you give away the source for free, yet also charge for the software? What stops people just downloading the source and compiling it, without paying?
The build process for some things is not trivial... Some of the big distros - SuSE and Redhad enterprise versions don't (and I could be wrong, but bare with me) have the source code available. Reproducing those distros in the binary bootable iso format is not for the faint of heart. Look at the elbow grease it took to get White Box Linux - compiled from the source of RHEL - up and running. In corporate, it is often easier to buy open source kit than get it running yourself. As a bonus, you get someone else to take care of the maintenance....
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Game companies have the luxury of a significant part of their product being covered by the 'non free' license of copyright - textures, level maps, music, etc. Unlike most software, a great deal of the value in a game is *not* in the source code.
It's substantially harder to sell "free as in freedom" (how I hate that term) software when the only real component of value in it *is* the source code, because your first customer can then turn around and give away (or even resell) your product.
As an aside, I expect to see more companies starting to use a tactic like this to create products using "free as in freedom" software without having to give away a fully functional version in source form by integrating non-source-code "stuff" that isn't covered by the GPL. Theo's copyright on the OpenBSD CD structure is a primitive example. Copyrighted filenames (if possible ?) would probably also be a similar way of stopping someone else just grabbing your source code, recompiling it and on-selling your product without having to expend time themselves renaming all the source files.
True enough, but keep in mind that "hard work" only has to be done _once_ by someone prepared to give it away and the value of that software disappears.
The author of Dansguardian states first that his software is not free for commercial purposes, but then says it is licensed under the GPL. This is a contradiction.
The GPL does not explicitly stipulate commercial or non-commercial use. Its only requirement is that source is distributed with binaries, and that all subsequent derivative works are also licensed under the GPL. If this guy wants to make his software non-free for commercial use, he should write his own license.
You're making erroneous assumptions, but don't feel bad, because GNU makes the same ones. The first bad assumption is that the reality follows theory. The second is that you're selling software.
The theory is that you can put a price tag on Free Software. The reality is that you're going to find precious few customers for it. Free Software is like a gate without a fence. You can charge all you want to use the gate, but without a fence you won't find too many people paying you for that privilege. You're going to sell to the first customer, and maybe to the second, but by the time you get to the fifth or sixth you'll find your earlier customers have become your competitors and driven down the market price to zero dollars.
There are no publicly available Free Software packages with a market price greater than zero. Take the GCC toolkit for example. GNU theoretically "sells" it for $45, but in reality everyone gets it for free. I know that I have several copies laying around, and I didn't pay for a one of them.
Which leads to the second bad assumption. When you find people "buying" Free Software, they aren't really buying the software. When you buy a boxed set of SuSE or Redhat you are not buying the software, you are buying the box, manuals, service and support, and the convenience of not having to download and burn your own CDs and DVDs. The software itself is free (as in french fries). Or take the "Deluxe GNU Distribution" which GNU sells for $5000. Do you really think people are buying GNU software for that kind of money? Of course not! They're buying a combination of custom prebuilt binaries and the warm fuzzy feeling a generous charitable donation gives.
Some people will be fooled, however. Some people will buy SuSE and Redhat not knowing that they can get it for no cost. What they're buying in this instance is an education. One notable commercial Open Source figure once admitted to me that he was in the business of taxing ignorance.
Please stop spreading this myth that you can sell the software. You can't. You can certainly sell a convenience, a support contract, or even warm fuzzies, but you cannot sell practically sell the software. The realities of economics won't let you.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!