Gavriel State <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Quite the opposite: It is not 'competitive advantage' that concerns us, > or others using our code without contributing their own code. It is > simply that we could not and cannot afford to do our development without > monetary compensation. If the OLE DLLs had been LGPLed, we could not > have been able to afford to do any DCOM work, since we would have had > no prospect of getting paid for it. > > Under the LGPL, the only possible business model is this: > a) Find someone who might need some piece of code > b) Sell them on: "We can do this for you, and release it under > the LGPL for $x dollars. We're really good at what we do, > honest" > c) Do the work, and hope to actually get paid.
well, a)+b) is really the same, and you left out d) sell support on the changes, but yes, there are only 3 choices. I really think that *GPL will have problems in the long term because there is no real economic way to sustain it, but it's going to take VAlinux/SUSE/RedHat to finally go down in flames for people to take a long, hard look at the issue. Think the patent model (with a much shorter protection period) is a good place to start. > The LGPL simply slams the door shut on that whole model, saying in effect > "It's my way or the highway". It also slams the door shut to non-development areas too. -r
