On Llu, 2004-01-05 at 18:47, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 12:52:46PM -0500, David Andrews wrote: > > Jay is right insofar that -- practically speaking -- you can only sell > > your code for more than your distribution cost one time. Eventually > > somebody like CheapBytes will come along and redistribute your GPLed > > code for next to nothing. > > Why would you give the software software you just bought for lots of > money freely away?
You don't. You sell it for a little less (because the person who wasnt willing to pay for it clearly didnt value it as much as you did as they didnt pay). Your total overall cost is now very low, but you took a high risk in obtaining it. The next person took a slightly lower risk but got it later and sold it for a bit less. Iterate a few cycles and for an infinitely cheaply replicable item it becomes free. The "information wants to be free" slogan is actually rather sound economics, but in the other sense of free 8). This is one of the reasons for copyright in its modern forms - to create an artificial value for information so that it is produced - even though it harms the overall economic efficiency by distorting the market to do so. Stallman's model works very well for some things, but it doesn't work for speculative development "I think xyz people want this so I'll put up the capital and profit if my information about xyz people is right and my information is better than the rest" or for some kinds of work like pooled development, unless these can be set off against other gains be they support revenue, more mainframe sales, whatever. You might argue that now when you buy an IBM mainframe with a free Linux you've merely altered upon which desk the money arrives. That's simplistic because it pre-supposes there is no value in your new rights to the source code enabled by this model and also ignores the higher efficiency in the development model due to lack of duplicate work which reduces the real software creation cost. This is also why there is so much interest all over the place in licensing models which give the end users the parts of the free software value they think they really want while allowing for speculative development and the like. While the MS and FSF models are radically different and both only work for some cases, it would also be a mistake to assume that there are not other licenses that play with the parameters between the two - Bitkeeper, Sun CSL, and ghostscript[1] being clear examples. Its an important area because free software models don't appear to work well for 'leading edge' technologies, but do as the product becomes more commodity (for obvious reasons - competition drives out profit margins on the software, entry and exit of the market is easy and a lot of the perfect market type conditions get fulfilled). Alan [1]Ghostscript for the S/390 not free software guru people who actually read this far has a license whereby the newest version is payware but becomes free software over time/releases. You get to pay for support and for having it "now", while everyone else gets the free one which is older
