Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Profits from GPLed software? Hardly.

Author:Ravi Nanavati
Posted:8/23/2000; 7:40:12 PM
Topic:Next survey: Are you an open source developer?
Msg #:20048 (In response to 20047)
Prev/Next:20047 / 20049

You also are ignoring the example of Cygnus Solutions, who, for about a decade before Red Hat bought them, were profitable making enhancements to GCC and the rest of the GNU toolchain and developed new related products like the Cygwin Unix emulation library for Windows. The GPL actually helped them make money because they charged proprietary developers who wanted proprietary licenses money while accepting contributions from the community. In fact, their development was so good that their fork of gcc, egcs, eventually became the main branch of development. It is fair to say that business models for free software are less proven and less well understood than business models for proprietary software (the same way proprietary software models were less proven and less understood in the 1970s when compared to proprietary hardware models). It is not fair to say that no knows how to build a sustainable business off of free software.

Personally, my only objection to the GPL does not come from its effect on proprietary software developers, which however you slice it is a deliberate choice of those who release GPL software, but rather its effect on free software developers who choose other licenses (like the MPL). I am of the opinion that most free software developers would not mind allowing their GPLed code to be linked to code under other free software licenses as long as there were adequate safeguards to ensure that the resulting binaries were free software (under whatever license) "all the way through" and would not become dependant on proprietary components.

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:56:12 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.