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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?"

3 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. selling a product vs. download by urdine · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

  2. Re:Forgive my ignorance, but how? by (H)elix1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  3. Re:Some.. by drsmithy · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Game companies seem to understand it.

    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.