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Leaving the GPL Behind
olddotter points out a story up at Yahoo Tech on companies' decisions to distance themselves from the GPL. "Before deciding to pull away from GPL, Haynie says Appcelerator surveyed some two dozen software vendors working within the same general market space. To his surprise, Haynie saw that only one was using a GPL variant. 'Everybody else, hands down, was MIT, Apache, or New BSD,' he says. 'The proponents of GPL like to tell people that the world only needs one open source license, and I think that's actually, frankly, just a flat-out dumb position,' says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, one of the many organizations now offering an open source license with more generous commercial terms than GPL."
"Adam King said... matthews, Make a post on one of those accounts right now and I will believe it is you. "
The source is clearly his ass.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Why, oh why would you choose a license based on a popularity contest? Pick the licenses that meet your legal needs.
Perhaps the assumption is that because these people/companies are in the business of selling software, they probably know a bit about what's good/bad for companies in that business? If I wanted to start a catering business, I'd probably go talk to some actual caterers (probably from safely out of town) to get an idea of how to do things.
Consider the Trolltech and Qt licence debacle where the loudest of the GPL advocates refused to even read the licence Qt was under and the many amendments it underwent. It was GPL or nothing, and there were even years of sour grapes after that. Qt was the small soft target next to the MIT, X and BSD licences so was the head that was wanted on a stake.
Remove a couple of people purely in it for the politics from the discussion and it's a completely different story with tolerence of many licences based purely upon the content of those licences. I'm talking about RMS mostly but there are a few others in it for the politics who do not like other open source groups (and please don't nitpick about alternative definitions of "open source" "free" etc). He has done many admirable things but remember that his agenda will not necessarily always line up with your own (eg. going from years of the stupid "linux, never heard of it" joke to implied ownership when gnu are not even capable of tracking down the code to their own abandoned projects).
Well for me RMS went into the "too fucking creepy" zone with this particular gem. For those who don't want to RTFL, I will quote RMS "I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. "
Ooooooookay. Having RMS as the spokesman for GPL is getting to be like finding the guy in the wife beater shirt to put on the 11 o' clock news when a tornado rips through a town. I mean after the whole "anti-TiVo" GPL V3 is it any wonder that companies don't want to use GPL? And if you want to see some more of his 'far out wacky hi jinks" just read them yourself.
Of course I'll probably be modded to hell for daring to point out Saint RMS is a seriously weird and creepy guy, but let's be honest here. Image matters. In this day and age image matters a LOT. And while the things he did in the 1980s were great and all, maybe it is time to pick a better spokesman than seriously creepy RMS.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Red Hat makes money off their services, not their product. If you think about it a bit, that's going to screw, say, game developers, unless you want everything to be MMOs (and even then, private servers will pop up, and then you're fucked).
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I don't disagree with a lot of what you say. I've donated to open source projects, both using my time and my money.
Regarding the entertainment industry, though? The money made is made because it's easier to just pay. (There's also the fact that most people can't have a movie theater in their house--similar stuff can't really be done with a video game.)
And I can think of plenty of open-source projects with a lot of users who don't get donations for their time and effort. Again, Warsow comes to mind.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
That sounds like your supporting his position rather than contradicting it. Why do photographers get favored rewards over sculptors or painters?
Most likely because they're more in demand. But the stuff that pirates are pirating is clearly in demand, they just don't want to pay for it.
Maybe single player games and movies are a special case. RMS avoided the question at the last talk I heard which leads me to believe he doesn't have a good answer.
From an economic perspective, I think it very much is. Even from a technical perspective, I think multiplayer games are (easier to cheat if you have the code, harder to catch you).
On the other hand people will still want to see movies and play games and be willing to pay for those games even copyright were changed so drastically.
I don't think they will. Because, frankly, people are fucking selfish bastards and will take what they can take for free. If it's not in front of them, they will never pay. Exceptions exist, but they are basically noise.
In the case of video games look at ToadyOne and DwarfFortress. He manages to develop DF full time off of donations.
Toady is also one guy, making a game that doesn't require a lot of technical expertise outside of code. I like Tarn a lot and I love DF, and I have donated, but I don't know if you've noticed, he isn't making much at all from his work. Enough to live on, yes--barely. Very barely.
Now expand that to a hundred or two hundred people. You're not getting very far.
If the donations were instead considered to be "investment in finishing the game" then you could see a smaller studio would be able to develop a game, even as grand as HL2, assuming they were "able to stand on the shoulders" of those who came before.
No, you really can't. Hint: the programming is not the largest part of making Half-Life 2. Unless you're positing that we see a bunch of recycled models in every game under the sun, you still have to pay for a legion of 3D modelers. Unless you're positing that we see a bunch of recycled textures in every game under the sun, you still have to pay for a bunch of texture artists. Unless you're positing that we hear the same sounds in every game under the sun, you have to pay for sound artists.
There's a lot more to a game than code. (And frankly, open source hasn't done a very good job of that: all the "big names" are derivatives of the originally closed-source Quake. If you want to see what you get for an open source engine, check out Sauerbraten. Try not to laugh.)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Sorry, missed a bit.
The fact that there are millions of dollars being funneled into a "Free as in Speech" product and that other methods than proprietary software sales are used to "recoup costs" sounds to me like you're supporting his point again rather than contradicting it.
There are no methods for a game that work the same way. Under the GPL, you sell it to one person and they can give it to everyone else. That isn't going to make you any money. Advertising? They have the code, bye bye advertising display code. Software as a service (an MMO, which only works for one very specific type of game)? Hello, private servers, goodbye revenue.
The pack-in model, including other stuff beside the game, is silly as well. Why? Because you are increasing your production costs to only get above a $0 sale point. All it does is increase your costs, without providing a lot of real value to the end user. Packing a game nominally worth $30 at the market with cost-$5 tchotchkes and then charging $10 for it? Why the hell would any significant group buy it? The game is the product, not the tchotchkes. Selling those won't recoup your investment.
This concept is not bad for some areas. It obviously works for Linux, although the GPL has held back advancement by fucking over driver developers (RMS still says the nVidia driver behavior is against the GPL, it's only because everybody ignores the guy that they persist). I am saying it does not work for a lot of others, and that anti-copyright fake-freedom idiots and GPL zealots alike don't consider anyone else before going I WANT I WANT I WANT.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I consider computer programming to be in many ways similar to art, yes.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Right, but if the code is free, why isn't the rest? Going both ways, free code but not free assets, is hypocritical.
Mind you, I don't entirely disagree with you, and I'm sure I could come up with a way to make it work. But if your whole deal isn't GPL'd, it kind of misses the "fweedom!" point according to RMS and his hangers-on.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Your post is interesting, and I wish I had time to reply point by point, but a few things:
-I am talking about the GPL in its "ideal state" (the entire kit and kaboodle, assets and all, being GPL'd, which is what the "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FUHREEEEE" crowd goes on about).
-I am not talking about the LGPL, and I have no problem with the LGPL. I won't use it because, frankly, fuck the FSF. I would use the CDDL or Mozilla Public License instead, which are more favorable to downstream developers (the separation is not at the binary level, where you can't statically link an LGPL library without your own code being infected; the CDDL/MPL places the "boundary" at the code file, and you can have proprietary and CDDL/MPL code files in the same compiled binary with no issues).
-You are one of very few people (I'm another one) who responsibly use AdBlock to reward sites by consenting to let them sell our eyeballs to their advertisers. There aren't many.
-I'm not a game developer who has any interest in sequelitis; in fact, my company's first major project is an X-Wing style space sim which we know isn't going to make a lot of money. We're doing it because we think that catering to the hardcore audience is a decent way for a four-guy company to stay afloat, without cashing in our integrity. (But no, our game engine is very much not going to be LGPL'd. It won't be expensive, but if you want to use it, you're licensing it.)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Where is the business case for me making more content when the first copy I sell can be freely and legally given away to anyone who wants it? This is precisely why the GPL for games is not at all a good idea.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."