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Right. As usual the software is never the fucking hard part, its the ancillary shit like law/tax etc. Open source code + paid services/support seems like it'd

• hyperpallium 9y ago
  It's a barrier to entry, favouring big caps that can afford international tax law specialist accountants/lawyers. I think that works: free means no royalty paid; and the convention above specifically excludes ordinary services (IIRC). It includes "scientific" etc advice in the next point (ii), and I never looked into exactly what that covers... services/support for an ordinary component doesn't sound like it's covered (and if it was, it wouldn't be because it was a component - the issue I raised). As a separate business issue, there's other problems with getting people to pay services for something they already have - in that sense, it's not "a way around". Of course, some market segments do really want that support. And if that's already your business model, well no problem. I can't think of any examples of an open source component with services/support. SleepcatDB and ghostscript are opensource components, but are dual-licensed (i.e. have a second proprietary license permitting redistribution as closed source). MySQL? Cygwin? Hibernate/JBoss? Red Hat?... not sure these are components that are often redistributed (though of course users could, license permitting).