At 9:40 PM -0700 on 7/14/99, Michael Fair wrote:
>> Alain : No one has commented yet on my suggestion to reserve the right
>> of OC distribution/resale for us, so that we can auto-finance our
>> activities. Comments?
>
>I think we would make more money if we got everybody
>and their grandmother distributing OT (CD or otherwise)
Agreed. Can we get the grandfather in, too? Make OpenCard CD's more common
than AOL CD's!
>and we charged for services like scripting, the ability
>to be a "priority customer" when requesting certain
>features be added, and documentation in book form.
Sounds like a deiority bug fixing. I'll manage to add that to bug tracker.
>The logic goes like this:
>
>If we reserve distribution rights to ourselves, we limit
>or ability to generate customers and are then charged
>with the responsibility to police and enforce that.
True.
>
>OTH, we give away distribution rights, and make it spread
>like a virus, embed the interpreter in every application
>that has a scripting language, and make it so easy to add
>an OT interpreter to your application that OT is all of
>a sudden the scripting language of choice, we, being the
>OT gurus are now a critical resource to those people.
>Sure they could hire someone else, or learn to do it
>themselves, but it's easier to hire us.
And with the complexity of learning certain parts of OpenCard (example: the
interpreter source is scary), it'd be cheaper to hire us, too.
>
>I am specifically thinking of the Multimedia development
>business. Most of them have very few programmers, and
>not many know C++, so if they need a specialized plugin,
>they are going to turn to us first. Why? Because they think
>we know what we are doing (and for the most part we do).
Let's hope it's a little better than "for the most part"!
>We get a great reputation for providing them with a tool
>that makes their business the best in the business, and they
>hire us to make sure they can deliver their products on time
>and can call us if they have an emergency. People who
>aren't computer fluent (and even some who are) will pay
>money to have a phone number or email address they can
>call when things don't go well. They don't understand OT
>the way we will, and they would rather keep it that way if
>they can.
Agreed. I'd be one of the few who could quickly provide a workaround for an
OT bug, for example.
>
>I say we give OT away completely free, encourage people
>distribute it however they want, make sure the code
>for the interpreter is Open Source to protect our
>investment, I like the LGPL and do not consider standalones
>"derived works" which means standalones can be released
Whether you consider them derived works does not matter. It's a matter of
law, and they are. If you combine a stack and OpenCard the resulting
program is a derived work of both OpenCard and the program.
And if we try to say that "standalones are not covered" we run into ther
problems, simular to what I responded to Alain with.
