On Tue, 2011-03-15 at 11:34 +0100, Matthias Kirschner wrote: > Cannonical is doing buisiness with Ubuntu. So why isn't Ubuntu > commercial? Same if I use Debian to implement a solution with my company > for another company (like some of http://www.debian.org/consultants/ > do). This solution includes software. If I sell the solution, why > wouldn't the software be commercial software?
Both these questions are answered by what I said previously: > > If you say software is commercial if at any point some group of people > > are poised to make money out of it or services surrounding it, or are > > paid to contribute to it, then basically all software is commercial, > > sure. But that seems to me just another version of the One True > > Scotsman fallacy. Because basically your argument here is reducing to "if I can find anyone gaining in some way by virtue of <product>, it is a commercial product" - and you then have nice malleable boundaries that you can stretch around anything. Is Debian non-commercial? No true non-commercial piece of software could be _sold_ for _money_ !! ... (etc. etc.) I'm just not sure I buy that logic, "non-commercial" ends up being the empty set. > > For me, software is commercial software if you enter into a transaction > > to obtain/use it. "Commercial" is the adjective applied to the noun > > "software", not the developers, the financiers, or anyone else. > > So in your view software can only be commercial if a) you have to pay > for license fees or b) the software is bundled with hardware for which > you pay (e.g. Free Software on your mobile, your dsl router, your PC)? No. I would view Emacs as being commercial being (as was, at least) the FSF would sell copies of it. I view RHEL has being commercial. They're both free software. Look, this whole thing is an attempt to divide software into two categories which aren't even mutually exclusive. Free vs. non-free _is_ mutually exclusive, so obviously you can't sensibly map from one to the other. But that doesn't mean that "commercial" doesn't have a broad meaning which is understood in similar terms by most people: it does. And honestly, the argument that "all free software can be commercial!" which technically true is essentially an attempt to avoid a discussion about how people can earn money directly from software development without needing to resort to services/other ancillary offerings. Being honest, most free software isn't commercial, and authoring free software as a vocation is extremely difficult to turn into an earning job. Cheers Alex. -- This message was scanned by Better Hosted and is believed to be clean. http://www.betterhosted.com _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
