I work with scientific instruments. Free/Libre software is completely
absent from my industry. The makers of this equipment make Microsoft
look like a puppy, the situation is completely medieval, you wouldn't
believe the horror stories...
There is a catastrophic, decade long, downsizing occurring within the
North American market(and presumably Western Europe) and strong growth
in areas with stereotypical weak software laws, Eastern Europe, India
and China. The high price($5K to $40K USD) of the "licensed" software
for North American labs makes for an unfair playing field and that,
along with lower labour costs is probably driving the downsizing.
Licenses are not import due to these things. Whether it is given away or
sold. it will be taken without a dongle or some lock down.
I know I could also just charge for support but if I ship good quality
software this doesn't seem like a good plan and time changes make
support complicated. Larger companies could easily fork the code and
with large staff provide better support across time zones.
I want to ship fully free software but I don't know how to make a
reasonable financial plan with the present situation.
The only viable plan I have come up with is to bind the software to a
propitiatory interface board.
Another nuttier idea is to leverage creative commons. If the following
assumption is correct and software that is not written in a C related
language(C++/C#/Java/Objective-C etc ), has little chance of someone
picking up the code base(maybe Haskell, Erlang, Ada). Then maybe I could
at least protect the N. American market by hardcoding images into the
code via svg and XPM, license these images with creative commons(code
under GPL) and sue other companies if they failed to remove them when
they fork the code. I am much more worried about a larger company
forking the code then labs "pirating it".
Sorry for going so far off topic. I have made a small donation in the
past. If someone on the list could help me work this out, there is a lot
of potential to make quite a lot of money and I could make a much bigger
one later-Patrick
- [Trisquel-users] OT Free software financial advice? (was RMS o... Patrick
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