"Rjack" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
THE GPL IS THE BEST FRIEND MICROSOFT EVER HAD. Open source advocates are
ideologically blinded to these facts.
That is an interesting spin to the issue!
The reality is that the GPL has no practical effect on anything of any
importance in terms of market development. One could, perhaps, take GPL
code and attempt to create a new software product by extending the GPL
source in some useful way, but, if you think about it more deeply, that is
ever so unlikely to be successful.
For example, say you could safely, without getting ground up in the gears of
the SFLC or FSF, hijack the source code for Open Office or Gimp or even
Linux itself. If you try to sell it as a product by itself, with nothing
added, you are going to fail, since the product is already available at
essentially zero cost and you have nothing to differentiate yourself. If
you add some useful improvement, you are still faced with a market that is
mature and will only spur the incumbent suppliers to duplicate your
improvement for their own products. The customers will classically wait for
the incumbent to adopt the new feature. Can you seriously believe that
another office suite or graphics package or OS platform can make any headway
against things like MS Office, Adobe Photoshop, or Windows itself? The
marketing and business issues involved in such an endeavor totally swamp the
technology issues.
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