begin quoting Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade as of Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 11:25:27AM -0700: > On Jun 12, 2008, at 10:34 AM, Bob La Quey wrote: > > >Selling software = bad business. > >Selling services enabled by software = good business. > > > >Just my take, > > > Really, that seems to hit it on the head. While there are definitely > customers that will want just the software and handle the service part > in-house, there are a great many other customers that will usually > just want whatever service you offer to be "someone else's problem." > > Going back a couple steps, though, if you're an independent software > developer, doing it for your sole source of income, your options > really are only: > > * Sell the software under a restrictive/proprietary license (and be > very careful to avoid any and all GPL code.)
This tends to restrict the customer-base. One of the reasons I bought a Mac (after the it's-a-laptop-it-runs-unix-squee primary reason) was that I got tired of limited choice of software available at a price-point I could afford. I like to keep my options open. > * Sell services which happen to depend on the software you've > developed. Without a firm contract in place, you end up at the mercy of the service provider; and I've had too many service providers change terms... what am I going to do? Suck it up and deal with it, that's what. >From a customer's point of view (well, my point of view as a customer), both alternatives suck, but the second sucks more. > It's really not much different if you're a small independent software > house. > > It's very hard to make a living on your own by doing all your work for > free (i.e., releasing everything you do GPL.) Yes, you might be hired > into a large firm, like Qualcomm, and be able to do it, but Qualcomm's > revenues are NOT based on GPL code. The fact that they'd allow code > to be released GPL is a side-effect of their core business, which is > most certainly not GPL software. > > Paying the rent without an income is hard. Can't make a business out > of altruism, without finding another way to bring money in. > > In my experience, people who insist that the GPL is the answer and > copyright should be abolished don't see the whole picture. I think you made my point better than I ever did. -- Done. Stewart Stremler -- KPLUG-List@kernel-panic.org http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
