Nadav Har'El wrote:
This may be an interesting way to make moneyExcept that the burden of keeping the number and identity of all copyright holders known and under control means one of two things. You either end up asking all contributers to assign copyright to you (as Sun are doing with OpenOffice), in which case they would ask, with justice, why should they let you make money from their contribution, or you can be the only one developing the software (as TrollTech and MySQL AB are doing, if I'm not mistaken), in which case you are losing all the technical reasons open source software is better than proprietary software.
for writers of free software - everybody can copy their software, but
only they have the ability to relicense it arbitrarily to fit the requirements
of proprietary software makers.
If you chose the later path, you are risking that your response times are going to be too short, and the community will either fork your project, or create an alternative one (as indeed happened to TrollTech).
In short, nice idea, but I don't have too much faith in this business model myself. Obviously it's working for MySQL AB and for TrollTech, but I'm not sure how much longer it's going to continue working, and I'm not sure how many other companies can carry it out.
Shachar
-- Shachar Shemesh Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd. http://www.lingnu.com/
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