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As a developer, the GPL is useful when you want to ensure that people don't take your work and profit from it. So it's often useful when companies want to level

by new299 12y ago

As a developer, the GPL is useful when you want to ensure that people don't take your work and profit from it. So it's often useful when companies want to level the playing field, without allowing competitors to gain an advantage. A cynic might say it allows you to subsume the competition, and control the market (if you maintain control of development). This can make the GPL a "safer" license for companies to release code under in some situations. The GPL is also useful if you have a political interest in moving the community as a whole toward open source software for everything. BSD-like licenses are useful when you want to gain adoption above all else. So BSD-like (or dual licensing) can be useful for example for file format reference parsers, tools were you want to gain adoption by companies (perhaps to later provide consulting work). As a user of software (not a developer/vendor of any kind). You probably don't care, as long as you can gain access to the sourcecode, so you can potentially get bugs fixed by a contractor. But the GPL protects users interests, so it may well be in your interest to support the use of the GPL on new projects.

geon 12y ago
> the GPL is useful when you want to ensure that people don't take your work and profit from it. Huh? Are you saying you can't make a profit from gpl-ed code? Then why was it written to begin with? If company A can profit from it, then so can company B. As far as licenses are concerned anyway. Time to market and network effects are probably much more important.
- wmf 12y ago
  The author of GPL code can (try to) profit via proprietary dual licensing, but others cannot. http://producingoss.com/en/dual-licensing.html http://producingoss.com/en/dual-licensing.html
- new299 12y ago
  > Huh? Are you saying you can't make a profit from gpl-ed code? Then why was it written to begin with? If company A can profit from it, then so can company B. I think selling GPL'd software is a difficult proposition yes. I don't think I know of any of any GPL projects which are sold for profit (unless there's some other value-add, in which case they are selling the value-add not the GPL'd software). > As far as licenses are concerned anyway. Time to market and network effects are probably much more important. In a limited view of software where you're only talking about websites you're possibly correct...
  - kevinnk 12y ago
    There are plenty of dual licensed codebases that make a profit with no additional value add (other than not having to respect the GPL.) For example, the popular C++ gui framework JUICE[1] [1] http://www.juce.com/faq#t78n75645 http://www.juce.com/faq#t78n75645
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  I cannot take any GPL code and put it into a product and sell the product without releasing the source. As the source would have to be available, people could take the source and compile the software and then wouldn't have to pay me, so I could never make a profit. It's why GPL and LGPL code is best (totally?) avoided in commercial closed-source products.
mikekchar 12y ago
I think what you mean is that it is useful when you want to ensure that people don't take your work and unfairly compete with you with it. Imagine this scenario: I spend $1m writing an embedded software development chain. This embedded system will do 90% of what everyone wants. My business model is to charge people for writing the code to make it do the other 10% that they want. Since everybody's 10% is likely quite different, it makes total economic sense for me to release the code under a free license in order to drive adoption of my tool set. There will always be more work for me to do and people willing to pay for that work. But as a commercial entity I have a risk. The risk is that if I release my tool set under a free license, somebody else will pick it up and offer services as well -- competing with me. However, I wrote the damn thing, so I feel pretty comfortable that I can out compete other people. Even if some people take a slice of the pie, if I can get very high adoption by distributing for free (no cost), I will still be ahead of the game. What I'm really concerned about is that somebody may make a proprietary change to my software and lock customers into their version. In this way, I've sunk $1m into the project and they may only invest $1k but be able to lock me out of my own market regardless of whether or not I'm a better programmer. Although the GPL was not built with this in mind (I don't think) it is a very powerful reason for commercial entities to embrace the GPL. In fact my choice of example (embedded tool set) was not entirely random. See: http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/tiemans.html http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/tiemans.htm... As the article mentioned, the choice of free software license is really dependent upon the circumstance. Slowly big enterprises are waking up to the idea that free licenses allows them to create consortium like development endeavours with very low barriers. They tend to use them when trying to stake out territory and when adoption is more important the instant revenue. One day, I believe they will realize the the GPL allows them to take a step further -- to fuel adoption that sells services.
- new299 12y ago
  Yes, this is what I meant. I also had a specific example in mind. Here's the scenario: You're a hardware vendor, you lead the market. The hardware you sell has also has a software component. You'd like to take software out of the equation while maintaining your lead in hardware. So you release the software under a GPL license. Other hardware vendors can start using the software, but they gain no advantage over you. With luck, because it's free and widely available, your GPL software becomes a de facto standard. You maintain some control over it's development. But overall software becomes less of a factor in purchasing, which is now based on hardware (which is what you wanted, perhaps because your hardware advantage is secure). New entrants into the market will also find it difficult to compete with you on software. Eventually a foundation may form to develop the software (like Symbian for example). Such a foundation pools the resources of a number of vendors, making it even harder to compete on software.
pmontra 12y ago
By the way, you always have the option of dual licensing your (A)GPL code, because the code is yours. You can AGPL your web app and make a deal with a company for a commercial license that will let them derive another web app from it without having to distribute changes. You can make deals with different clauses with different companies.

by new299 12y ago

geon 12y ago

> the GPL is useful when you want to ensure that people don't take your work and profit from it. Huh? Are you saying you can't make a profit from gpl-ed code? Then why was it written to begin with? If company A can profit from it, then so can company B. As far as licenses are concerned anyway. Time to market and network effects are probably much more important.

wmf 12y ago
The author of GPL code can (try to) profit via proprietary dual licensing, but others cannot. http://producingoss.com/en/dual-licensing.html http://producingoss.com/en/dual-licensing.html
new299 12y ago
> Huh? Are you saying you can't make a profit from gpl-ed code? Then why was it written to begin with? If company A can profit from it, then so can company B. I think selling GPL'd software is a difficult proposition yes. I don't think I know of any of any GPL projects which are sold for profit (unless there's some other value-add, in which case they are selling the value-add not the GPL'd software). > As far as licenses are concerned anyway. Time to market and network effects are probably much more important. In a limited view of software where you're only talking about websites you're possibly correct...
- kevinnk 12y ago
  There are plenty of dual licensed codebases that make a profit with no additional value add (other than not having to respect the GPL.) For example, the popular C++ gui framework JUICE[1] [1] http://www.juce.com/faq#t78n75645 http://www.juce.com/faq#t78n75645
72deluxe 12y ago
I cannot take any GPL code and put it into a product and sell the product without releasing the source. As the source would have to be available, people could take the source and compile the software and then wouldn't have to pay me, so I could never make a profit. It's why GPL and LGPL code is best (totally?) avoided in commercial closed-source products.

mikekchar 12y ago

I think what you mean is that it is useful when you want to ensure that people don't take your work and unfairly compete with you with it. Imagine this scenario: I spend $1m writing an embedded software development chain. This embedded system will do 90% of what everyone wants. My business model is to charge people for writing the code to make it do the other 10% that they want. Since everybody's 10% is likely quite different, it makes total economic sense for me to release the code under a free license in order to drive adoption of my tool set. There will always be more work for me to do and people willing to pay for that work. But as a commercial entity I have a risk. The risk is that if I release my tool set under a free license, somebody else will pick it up and offer services as well -- competing with me. However, I wrote the damn thing, so I feel pretty comfortable that I can out compete other people. Even if some people take a slice of the pie, if I can get very high adoption by distributing for free (no cost), I will still be ahead of the game. What I'm really concerned about is that somebody may make a proprietary change to my software and lock customers into their version. In this way, I've sunk $1m into the project and they may only invest $1k but be able to lock me out of my own market regardless of whether or not I'm a better programmer. Although the GPL was not built with this in mind (I don't think) it is a very powerful reason for commercial entities to embrace the GPL. In fact my choice of example (embedded tool set) was not entirely random. See: http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/tiemans.html http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/tiemans.htm... As the article mentioned, the choice of free software license is really dependent upon the circumstance. Slowly big enterprises are waking up to the idea that free licenses allows them to create consortium like development endeavours with very low barriers. They tend to use them when trying to stake out territory and when adoption is more important the instant revenue. One day, I believe they will realize the the GPL allows them to take a step further -- to fuel adoption that sells services.

new299 12y ago
Yes, this is what I meant. I also had a specific example in mind. Here's the scenario: You're a hardware vendor, you lead the market. The hardware you sell has also has a software component. You'd like to take software out of the equation while maintaining your lead in hardware. So you release the software under a GPL license. Other hardware vendors can start using the software, but they gain no advantage over you. With luck, because it's free and widely available, your GPL software becomes a de facto standard. You maintain some control over it's development. But overall software becomes less of a factor in purchasing, which is now based on hardware (which is what you wanted, perhaps because your hardware advantage is secure). New entrants into the market will also find it difficult to compete with you on software. Eventually a foundation may form to develop the software (like Symbian for example). Such a foundation pools the resources of a number of vendors, making it even harder to compete on software.

pmontra 12y ago

By the way, you always have the option of dual licensing your (A)GPL code, because the code is yours. You can AGPL your web app and make a deal with a company for a commercial license that will let them derive another web app from it without having to distribute changes. You can make deals with different clauses with different companies.