I’m with Keith on this – the universe is sadly too small for there
to be much benefit to using such a license. I am more of a BSD
License man, myself.
In my own little world of Actions, I make a point of releasing
everything unencoded. This is for a couple of reasons:
One, everything I know about Actions I got for free from the (sadly
neglected) documentation or from reading other Actions’ source. So
every time I encounter an Action that is only available in encrypted
form, I cry a little. Because how else will the universe expand than
if people put energy into it?
Two, releasing this code and letting other people profit from it has
been a serious profit center for me over the past ten years that
I’ve been writing Actions and server-side code. It raises my profile
in the community, gets me known as a go-to guy for tough problems,
and most importantly, takes the easy problems off my plate. Easy
problems have low price points. I really want other people to know
how to do the cheap stuff, and I want to help other people do it
themselves. Then, when the hard problems come along, I am ready to
help – and profit – and my prices (which don’t vary as much as one
might expect based on the job’s complexity) are usually in line with
the client’s budget. See, there is a profit motive in there somewhere!
As far as the GPL itself goes, versions 1 and 2 were actually
workable, from my perspective. Version 3 got way too political (as
if!) and tipped me over into the backlash crowd. I make a point now
of seeking out solutions (when I’m looking for library code to use in
my applications) that are in the Apache/BSD/MIT license end of the
spectrum. (As in: “This software is free. If you like it, use it. If
you use it, please include this message and author attribution
somewhere in the source code. If it blows up your mainframe, please
cry elsewhere.”)
My two (devalued) New American Pennies. Probably useful for shimming
a wobbly sideboard.
Walter
On Oct 20, 2008, at 5:57 AM, Keith Martin wrote:
Sometime around 20/10/08 (at 05:00 -0400) Paul said:
I kind of wonder how people make money using the GPL to be honest.
I certainly can’t see how a small company or one man band can
expect to see anything for their labours.
It works effectively if there are a good number of people doing it.
Then you reap the benefit of others’ work at the same time as
providing yours, whether you’re working on your own or as part of a
multi-national team. It is a bit like voting in elections; one vote
on its own doesn’t make any difference worth worrying about, but
gather enough ‘one votes’ together and you have a force to be
reckoned with. Another way to describe it would be ‘critical mass’.
I’ll probably annoy any hard-core open-source or GPL fans
(different things, I know) that may be reading this, but - in your
case, in this market, I don’t see how it would benefit anyone to
any significant degree in the long run.
k
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