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right. You can sell it, but don't expect to keep selling it as a long term business. Why? Anyone that purchases a single copy can re-compile and re-release t

right. You can sell it, but don't expect to keep selling it as a long term business. Why? Anyone that purchases a single copy can re-compile and re-release to the world for free. In addition to this, anyone can share it for free and it's allowed by the license. If your app has any popularity it all, you will slowly lose your customer base because it's too easy to generate free competition (you will essentially with an exact duplicate of your software for free, and it's legal), unless of course you want to become a support company. Support might work for larger companies, but doesn't scale well at all for a one-man shop. It's quite obvious to me that Stallman doesn't want you to be able to charge for software, due to the very nature of the license. He has said when questioned that support is a viable way to make money from "free software". I don't know about you, but I don't want to run a support company.

makecheck 15y ago
It's true that a 3rd party may not charge what you'd charge and your income may decrease, but your costs would also decrease somewhat. If another site hosts your software too, that's less potential load on your download servers to handle the actual number of users. With some hosting providers, this directly reduces the amount of money you spend on web hosting (whenever less bandwidth is consumed). And even if a 3rd party hosts your software, they can't just take away your copyright and claim that they wrote the software themselves. The software remains associated with you so the 3rd party's hosting provides a bit of free advertising. Maybe you didn't spend money on advertising, but some people do; and you could arguably spend less if enough 3rd party sites make it known that your project exists. This probably doesn't amount to much but my point is that 3rd parties aren't creating complete freebies; their actions do help a little.
rbanffy 15y ago
> Anyone that purchases a single copy can re-compile and re-release to the world for free. I have licensed a lot of custom-built software under the GPL (because I used GPL'ed bits and pieces). None of my clients ever redistributed their software, most likely because they considered it a competitive advantage. Think about it for a moment and you'll realize it's not a big problem. For me, it's an advantage, because I could reuse the code I did in other projects, something I wouldn't be able to do if I didn't license the code under the GPL in the first place. > Stallman doesn't want you to be able to charge for software No. What he doesn't want is that programmers are able to restrict freedoms of their users. BSD allows that. GPL forbids that. In other words, he fights for the users. ;-)
- shabble 15y ago
  > I have licensed a lot of custom-built software under the > GPL (because I used GPL'ed bits and pieces). None of my > clients ever redistributed their software, most likely > because they considered it a competitive advantage This makes sense if you're selling some niche code to businesses, but things like the Sveasoft Linksys firmware drama indicate that selling direct to users, especially technical users who understand and maybe already use the GPL, is a whole different world.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    Yes, but Linksys is selling routers, not software. And basing their firmware on GPL'ed code presumably reduces cost and time to market. The same applies to Sveasoft. Some people think they can have their cake and eat it too. The price of using GPL is setting your users free. edit: thanks for the corrections, narcissus
    - narcissus 15y ago
      Shabble was talking about Sveasoft: a company that made their own firmware based on Linksys', but got stroppy when other people starting to distribute their 'fork'.
      - rbanffy 15y ago
        Oops... Sorry. Now I'm curious. I didn't follow the story. How did it end?
        shabble 15y ago
        Ah, I thought it was reasonably common knowledge, so I didn't elaborate on it. Essentially, Sveasoft (which is/was, iirc, a single guy) took the original Linksys firmware releases, and built some fairly impressive new features on top. His business plan involved selling subscriptions to receive updates on a regular basis, with the sources being made public (beyond the subscribers) after some embargo period. What actually happened was that very few people subscribed, and immediately began posting the latest sources publicly (as permitted under the GPL), which resulted in Sveasoft threatening them with legal action, issuing C&Ds to anyone involved, and inserting more and more complicated tracking tokens and other booby-traps in the code. I'm not sure if (how?) it's ended, but there is still activity on at least one of the anti-sveasoft sites: http://sveasoft.blogspot.com/ http://sveasoft.blogspot.com/ http://wrt54g.thermoman.de/#readingpleasure http://wrt54g.thermoman.de/#readingpleasure has a lot of the original stuff, I think. I suspect it's mostly died down because there are now much more viable alternatives (DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato, etc) than there were at the time, and nobody wants the hassle of dealing with it. It does raise the issue (as mentioned in the licence article this thread is about) of dealing with the GPL on embedded devices, where most of the work is in kernel modules or statically linked binaries. The usual techniques which allow proprietary software to be segregated and interface with GPL code aren't really appropriate, and it's quite difficult to build such a thing. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on your perspective, of course.

makecheck 15y ago

It's true that a 3rd party may not charge what you'd charge and your income may decrease, but your costs would also decrease somewhat. If another site hosts your software too, that's less potential load on your download servers to handle the actual number of users. With some hosting providers, this directly reduces the amount of money you spend on web hosting (whenever less bandwidth is consumed). And even if a 3rd party hosts your software, they can't just take away your copyright and claim that they wrote the software themselves. The software remains associated with you so the 3rd party's hosting provides a bit of free advertising. Maybe you didn't spend money on advertising, but some people do; and you could arguably spend less if enough 3rd party sites make it known that your project exists. This probably doesn't amount to much but my point is that 3rd parties aren't creating complete freebies; their actions do help a little.

rbanffy 15y ago

> Anyone that purchases a single copy can re-compile and re-release to the world for free. I have licensed a lot of custom-built software under the GPL (because I used GPL'ed bits and pieces). None of my clients ever redistributed their software, most likely because they considered it a competitive advantage. Think about it for a moment and you'll realize it's not a big problem. For me, it's an advantage, because I could reuse the code I did in other projects, something I wouldn't be able to do if I didn't license the code under the GPL in the first place. > Stallman doesn't want you to be able to charge for software No. What he doesn't want is that programmers are able to restrict freedoms of their users. BSD allows that. GPL forbids that. In other words, he fights for the users. ;-)

shabble 15y ago
> I have licensed a lot of custom-built software under the > GPL (because I used GPL'ed bits and pieces). None of my > clients ever redistributed their software, most likely > because they considered it a competitive advantage This makes sense if you're selling some niche code to businesses, but things like the Sveasoft Linksys firmware drama indicate that selling direct to users, especially technical users who understand and maybe already use the GPL, is a whole different world.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  Yes, but Linksys is selling routers, not software. And basing their firmware on GPL'ed code presumably reduces cost and time to market. The same applies to Sveasoft. Some people think they can have their cake and eat it too. The price of using GPL is setting your users free. edit: thanks for the corrections, narcissus
  - narcissus 15y ago
    Shabble was talking about Sveasoft: a company that made their own firmware based on Linksys', but got stroppy when other people starting to distribute their 'fork'.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      Oops... Sorry. Now I'm curious. I didn't follow the story. How did it end?
      - shabble 15y ago
        Ah, I thought it was reasonably common knowledge, so I didn't elaborate on it. Essentially, Sveasoft (which is/was, iirc, a single guy) took the original Linksys firmware releases, and built some fairly impressive new features on top. His business plan involved selling subscriptions to receive updates on a regular basis, with the sources being made public (beyond the subscribers) after some embargo period. What actually happened was that very few people subscribed, and immediately began posting the latest sources publicly (as permitted under the GPL), which resulted in Sveasoft threatening them with legal action, issuing C&Ds to anyone involved, and inserting more and more complicated tracking tokens and other booby-traps in the code. I'm not sure if (how?) it's ended, but there is still activity on at least one of the anti-sveasoft sites: http://sveasoft.blogspot.com/ http://sveasoft.blogspot.com/ http://wrt54g.thermoman.de/#readingpleasure http://wrt54g.thermoman.de/#readingpleasure has a lot of the original stuff, I think. I suspect it's mostly died down because there are now much more viable alternatives (DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato, etc) than there were at the time, and nobody wants the hassle of dealing with it. It does raise the issue (as mentioned in the licence article this thread is about) of dealing with the GPL on embedded devices, where most of the work is in kernel modules or statically linked binaries. The usual techniques which allow proprietary software to be segregated and interface with GPL code aren't really appropriate, and it's quite difficult to build such a thing. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on your perspective, of course.