Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Profits from GPLed software? Hardly.
Author: Brett Glass Posted: 8/23/2000; 7:48:40 PM Topic: Next survey: Are you an open source developer? Msg #: 20051 (In response to 20048) Prev/Next: 20050 / 20052
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.No, I'm not ignoring Cygnus; I just haven't addressed their specific case yet. (And I don't have much longer to write here before I have to get back to work and quit fooling around on this message board, so this is the last thing I'll post before signing off for the night.) Here's what Bill Barr, who worked for Cygnus until recently, had to say about their business model on a public mailing list:
The support model is marginally profitable, but far from lucrative. When I worked at Cygnus Solutions, the company had experienced some really tough years in the past and was trying to transition to a product model. It's much harder to sell support than it is to sell a box. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of revenues came from semi-conductor manufacturers and embedded systems shops, not the desktop/server software development community. Overall, trying to sell support for free software tools to software developers was pretty much a complete bust.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.
Richard Stallman is moving in the other direction. He recently deprecated the license that did this -- the LGPL -- changing its name from the "Library GPL" to the "Lesser GPL." (The way this was done on the FSF Web site -- all traces of the older term were removed -- is reminicent of the way the protagonist of 1984 edits old newspapers in an effort to "change" history.) Why did Stallman make this change? Because, seeing that the GPLed Linux was gaining in popularity, he felt that he could be more insistent upon pushing the more destructive license.
Personally, I wouldn't classify the GPL as "free" software in any sense of the word except the price paid by users. It is heavily, heavily encumbered by a complex and intentionally deceptive license.
--Brett
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