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

Re: Profits from GPLed software? Hardly.

Author:Brett Glass
Posted:8/24/2000; 9:15:00 AM
Topic:Next survey: Are you an open source developer?
Msg #:20098 (In response to 20089)
Prev/Next:20097 / 20099

Both MacOS X and BSD/OS are examples of successful commercial products based on BSD-licensed code. BSDi, unlike Red Hat, has always been profitable -- that's right, it made money its very first quarter in business and has continued to do so. And the company has contributed to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD as well. It hasn't given away the farm, of course, but its contributions have been quite valuable.

This is possible because the BSD license makes it feasible to stay in business by adding unique value to publicly available code. It is not possible to do this with GPLed code such as Linux, and the proof of this is that companies such as Caldera and Red Hat are not profitable. (Corel also made the mistake of jumping on the Linux bandwagon -- a poor business decision which caused the company to lose money and was one reason for the recent resignation of its founder.)

The GPL kills businesses and precludes many from coming into existence at all. It sets commercial programmers at odds with those who work on non-commercial software. It aids large behemoths such as Microsoft by destroying small companies which otherwise might grow to be serious competitors. It isn't even open source according to the two most commonly accepted definitions, because it discriminates against a field of endeavor. A truly free, ethical open source license such as the MIT X license or BSD license has none of these problems and should be the license of choice.

--Brett Glass

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