El 03/09/12 12:23, [email protected] escribió:
The thought is about monetizing free software. In the traditional
sense, free software relies on donations, a big company willing to
give their code away for free, or creating custom software for a
company. That is totally understood.
With having your libraries and core software as free software, you are
already being generous for giving away the source code for your hard
work so someone can take that and do what they want with it.
Especially if you weren't paid or making any profit in creating that
core software
Let's say you create this core software and 5 companies hire you to
create a software application. By having the core application in a
permissive license you are able to give them peace of mind that they
wont have to release ALL of the code for final product due to a
license like the GPL while still having that core software compatible
with the GPL.
On top of that you may have a free library that connects to MySQL but
didn't have the time or resources to have one that connects to
Postgres or Oracle. Maybe you didn't want to pay a license to Oracle.
Whatever. That could be the situation where you create a plugin for
Oracle and offer it as a seperate paid for and proprietary plugin that
you charge the consumer for since they are the exception.
I'm seeing it where the majority of the customers will use the free
software but when something beyond that is needed, you create it and
make it non-free without comprimising the original core application
due to it being a plugin and that non-free component isn't included or
even talked about in the one you host on Github.
You are mixing 2 separate issues: freedom and cost. Monetizing something
does not mean restricting users' freedom. Giving up something for free
does not mean you have to trap the user with another software to make
money. The freedom a student has to use the knowledge the teacher gives
him does not mean the teacher will charge or will not charge. The
teacher should charge before teaching the class so he/she doesn't have
to restrict students from using that knowledge or else just suck it up.
--
Saludos libres,
Quiliro Ordóñez
Presidente
Asociación de Software Libre del Ecuador - ASLE
Av de la Prensa N58-219 y Cristóbal Vaca de Castro
Quito, Ecuador
(593)2-253 5534
(593)2-340 1517
(593)8-454 8078
