At 5:06 PM -0800 2/6/02, David A. Desrosiers wrote: > I have spoken directly to companies like Palm, Macromedia, etc. and >get a similar response that "..we'll lose money if we make our product >available for Linux, because we have to give it away for free, and give the >source code away..". This is a huge misconception. You can keep the source >code closed if it runs on Linux, you can sell it to people if it runs on >Linux, or you can give it away for free, including source, or sell the >application AND give the source away. There are many different ways of >supporting Linux, while still keeping your source code proprietary, AND >making money on the code itself.
I'm not sure who you've been talking to, but that's not the position or conception of the Tools group. Phil Shoemaker was just talking about making the tools as cheap as possible, preferably free. But we have no intention of releasing all of the source code (in some cases, we can't, because we license it from other companies). > It is, however, more difficult to maintain a portable solution that >works with Linux, Macintosh, Win32 and keep the development moving forward >without delays. Witness the great work Keith Rollin and the community are >doing to improve POSE, while still fixing portability buglets and other >issues. Thanks for the compliment. And while I don't want to denigrate the support of "the community" over the years, the amount of work contributed from that sector really doesn't amount to much. I get more questions about "Why doesn't Poser 3.3 work with FLTK 1.1b<whatever>" than I do about anything else. I keep waiting for just ONE developer to transition past that to actually making the appropriate changes and submitting them (along with a configure script that lets Poser use both FLTK 1.0 and 1.1). -- Keith -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/support/forums/
