Tim Cook wrote:
> I would not say taht I was convinced about the GPL.
Ok, more to the point, what are you qualms about the failings of the GPL in a
commerical sense? I'm not so bothered myself, but many free software/open source
developers really arn't happy about
contributing code to a community that allows people to then take those changes and
incorporate them into their own product without contributing their own changes to the
pool of software.
I think what you need to understand from a commercial perspective, especially the case
of the health care industry, the advantage we have is of pooling resources and
standardising on a code base.
The thousands of health care organisations benefit from the open source *process* (as
opposed to the source code itself) by being able to cooperate to develop one piece of
software which they can
all copy freely, rather than pay for each copy they make, and dissallowing them from
contributing to the software.
I don't see any advantage in letting persons fork the code into a proprietary product
that may take resources away from the primary pool of source code, and indeed there
are many disadvantages. This
is a matter of finding a better process for developing software, not altruism.
The money will always be in the services you can provide to support the free code. It
is indeed short sighted to think that there can be money made in selling a propriatary
product without harming
the efforts of the free software code base.
Be shrewd in your decision.
--
Oliver White
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