David Elliott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > but I have yet to see a successful mode that has no propriatary component. > At the moment, this is true. Most of the open source companies have at > least some proprietary software built on top of an open source foundation. [snip] > I think that in fact > it will become much more viable. The key is that in order to make this > model work you need to be selling to a market that is unable or unwilling > to provide their own support. As mentioned before, Red Hat may not be > doing great, but if you take into account that they have a very small > viable market (that is, the people actually willing to pay for support) > then they are doing pretty damn well.
don't know about that. Considering their cost of goods conceptually is zero... As for support, I don't see it ever being a panacea for the industry. Various models for support have already been tried by commerical companies with varying levels of success. However, there's a really bad side to this model, as it puts the economic incentive on generating support calls - which means that there is LESS incentive for fixing bugs (even in site support, you're less apt to buy it if the program is trouble free). > > > It is these sorts of people and companies that we want to target. And > > > financially Patrik's money for his license or even the money form all > > > the wine developers would be nearly insignificant compared to a 100+ > > > seat site license. > > uh, how can you sell a N-seat site license with something that is covered > > by *GPL (since this would be a violation of the license)? If your model > > is to sell by seat, I would like you see the reasoning between the > > difference of a 10 seat license and a 100 seat license with the *GPL. > If you are selling support then you can most definitely sell per-seat. If that what they are doing (Selling a support contract for N seats). Hard to tell by the wording. > You cannot expect to sell a free product without some sort of value > added. That value can be a proprietary component or can be support for > free components or can be other stuff that no-one as yet thought of. If > your business model is to sell only what your customers can get for free > then you are really, really, really, stupid. no argument here. > > As I said before, if a copyleft is all that is needed, choose a copyleft > > that makes SENSE. LGPL may be convienient, but I have seen no rational > > argument in having the *GPL's brand of copyleft (other than it's widely > > used). I think the mozilla project would be a good place to look... > > > This is a very valid argument. Although realize that they are now > MPL/LGPL/GPL triple licensed. And the only reason I could see for having > the MPL in there was so Netscape can take the code and release > closed-source versions. maybe so, but I think that LGPL/GPL was ADDED because mozilla touched too many things under those licenses. MPL has a 1 year grace period, plus its copyleft is not nearly as viral. I'm not saying it's perfect, but is a good place to start. > This doesn't really work well for Wine as the codebase is not owned\ > by a single entity. well, that benefit wouldn't be realized, but there is more to the license. > If you have a copyleft license that you feel would make more sense for > Wine than the LGPL, please discuss it with us. There's a gazillion licenses. Haven't seen any concensus on what the license should have (just what it SHOULDN'T have). Would think anything FSF considers a weak copyleft would be something to look at IF you want a copyleft. Wonder if Gav has any opinions on a copyleft license... -r -r
