OFB Community Mailing Lists

[David Aikema]

On 5/19/05, Don Parris <evangelinux at thefreelyproject.org> wrote:

> Everyone has the opportunity to make money.  How many different on-line
> stores sell GNU/Linux CDs?  
> How many consulting businesses have sprung up
> around LOSS? (I don't know, either.)  A po' boy like me has the opportunity
> to become technically adept, and find ways to capitalize on that.  That does
> not mean that all the folks who live in the slums don't have other issues to
> address in the process.  Still, they have an actual equal opportunity, as
> opposed to a theoretical equal opportunity.

I'd be curious to learn what percentage of those shops are actually
making a profit.  I honestly can't remember the last time that I
directly paid for CDs containing a distribution release (the closest
that I can think of is the Mandrake-Club membership I had, but I could
have gotten those CDs by going the download route as well - I only had
a standard membership, so I didn't get the ISOs with the commercial
packages).  In general, with broadband, I've found that it's typically
faster to just download than to buy a physical copy.

As well, if I sell a burned copy of your software, how is this
benefitting you (unless you take the increased-usage implying
hopefully tech-support... maybe someone willing to pay for the
addition of features)?  My ability to gain money from your work
without sending anything back to you sounds kind of communistic to me.

I see a lot of advantage for the implementor/distributor, but not
necessarily much for the behind-the-scenes programmer.

There's also the addage that it takes money to make money ... if I can
code, but don't have the available resources to sufficiently market my
product/skills, then it seems to me somewhat unlikely that I would
make of anything from it.

> If you want to sell the software, just put a price on it.  You can put a
> second price on the source, as long as it is not higher than the binary
> distro.  For instance, according to the FSF, I could write a new app, sell
> the binaries at, say, $50.00.  I can then charge an additional fee for the
> source code, as long as the second fee is not higher than $50.00.  The
> reason for that is that, without a limitation, people could *effectively*
> cut off access to the source by charging an astronomical fee.

Well, let's say you developed your product and think that it's worth
$50 / person in terms of convenience.  What if one person buys a copy,
and then immediately rereleases the source code at no cost... then I
am no longer able to market my work at any reasonable price, and I
wouldn't expect the first user to necessarily be willing to pay the
whole cost of development.  However, I'd either have to do exactly
that, or before making any sales first find X buyers, where each buyer
is willing to pay $(total cost) / X.

> Mandriva,

Mandriva seems to surviving, although at least some of this must be
attributed to the club that they're running.  There aren't really that
many benefits to a standard membership though, and I'm not sure how
well the community would support multiple clubs of this sort.

> Red Hat, & SUSE are decent examples (though not necessarily the

I don't really think that Red Hat is the best example, given that it's
licensing policy for the enterprise linux basically limits the ability
granted by the GPL to make additional copies... I'm wondering if we'll
end up seeing a court challenge to their licensing scheme one of these
days.

There are projects reusing RHEL source RPMs, but AFAIK this is only
legal as Red Hat is distributing these source RPMs free to all from
their website.  If the creators of these rebuilt-RHEL distros had in
fact signed a licensing agreement with Red Hat, I think that the
license agreement basically prohibits them from doing this.

Of course, I'm not a lawyer, and it's been a while since I looked into
this, but that's the sort of situation I recall.

> best).  Why would Novell have bought SUSE if it were failing?  Of course,
> Yast was initially proprietary, until Novell released it under a libre
> license.

Novell basically had Netware (which is fading out of the picture), and
didn't really seem to have many options left.  I don't think that
they're the best example of a company with a great record.  They did
seem to go on a buying spree, but with the exception of licensing
revenue from their old closed-source products, I'm unsure if they're
making a profit.

David