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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?"
Do you know of any software packages that are Open Source, but still require you to purchase them?
How about Trolltech's Qt for Windows? It's strictly commercial, but comes with source code. Actually lots of commercial development tools and libraries fit this model, probably because programmers find tools that provide source code to be much more useful. It's also quite common among certain software packages used by big business: packages that have to be heavily customized. Every large-scale point-of-sale software package (e.g. the software that runs the checkout lanes at the grocery store) comes with a source license, or makes one available for a reasonable fee (which everyone buys as a matter of course).
Binary-only software is a very new thing, historically. It was really quite uncommon prior to the rise of microcomputers, probably because the people who ran and managed the workstations, minis and mainframes were largely programmers and they found that software with source was more useful (who'da thunkit?).
If you're referring to software that is licensed under an open source license that allows redistribution, then no, I don't think you'll find too many packages that fit the model, and I don't think authors who try to do that will be immensely successful at selling software. But selling software with source works just fine, thanks to the power of copyright law. And selling services and support around truly Free Software works pretty well also.
Actually, I think that people who expect copyright protection for binary-only software are abusing copyright. The purpose of the law is to promote the growth of science and useful arts by encouraging publication, so that other people can learn from the ideas to create even more stuff. But these days we allow people to eat their cake and have it too; they can both obtain society's help in protecting their source code from illicit copying *and* they can also keep it secret to prevent people from learning their ideas. IMO, if you don't want to publish source code, you shouldn't get copyright protection for your source code. Use trade secret law to protect it. That's not as good, because under trade secret law if someone leaks it you can only go after the leaker, not anyone else who distributed the now-public information, but that's the tradeoff you should have to make: If I publish my ideas so others can build on them, then society will help me make sure no one copies my code, or creats unauthorized derivative works. If I keep my ideas secret, then I have to protect my code myself (I can still get copyright protection on the published binaries, however).
Unfortunately, old copyright law never foresaw that it might be possible to publish your work while simultaneously keeping it secret, and new copyright law has forgotten all about the need to balance private vs. public good.
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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?
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
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
Have any games companies released a game that used the GPL version of the Quake 2 engine? It would seem to me that it's a pretty good deal: just stick a tar of the source on the CD and you've forefilled the requirements of the GPL. Of course, your content need not be distributed under the GPL.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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/