Re: Re: [OT] Software Freedom

["Mukund" <betacomp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

| X is a "good guy" who believes in making software and giving it away
| with  no restrictions other than a "thank you" note. His software
| after some time comes to the attention of the capitalist "bad guy" Y,
| who decides to make money out of it. Y takes the sources, makes minor
| changes to it, packages it well and sells it as Y's own
| software. With the resultant money, Y puts in more work into the
| software and soon the result is really much better than the original
| software - the difference being that you got to pay through your nose
| for it.


What if Y is bad guy and just make a minor changes and make it close source.
And If Y is Indian then he can take the full advantage of *stupid* Software
Pundits.
A few days back one company from banglore actually did this.

| Okay now let's take stock of the situation.
|
| At the end of all this,
|
| Y's customers - who are willing to pay(and pay a lot) feel
| assured of buying the same software from Y, and the market dynamics
| ensures that these paying customers get the features *they* want in
| the software that they buy. Maybe not every new feature(but that is
| another story).
|
| X's software is still available for free. So all who don't want to pay
| for the software, want to change the software to their own liking, or
| want to distribute and make money out of the distribution - still can
| do it. Of course, it is inferior now, but that's the price you pay
| for such a system, where developers work in their own spare
| time. Maybe in this whole time , more work has gone inside it and it
| HAS become better.


Y will be all alone while there will hundreds of people who will make the X
software better, even M$ would not able to afford the services of these
people.

That is the power of open source.

| Now suppose X gives away his/her software under GPL. This ensures
| that Y doesn't get
| away with selling the software in a closed manner. Y decides to stay
| away from it and develop similar software from scratch. okay maybe 1
| out of 50 "Y" kind of folks decide to make opensource GPLed software
| from the original X one.


Y can always sell the software free and provide the service at cost.


|
| So at the end, you have
|   customers of X + 2% of customers of Y reaping benifit from the
|   software. The rest 98% Y kinds of folks either duplicate the
|   effort, or maybe steal GPL code ;), or simply don't find developing
|   from scratch viable.

|So tell me, in the larger issue of benefit to the community which
|licence is better? Where am I going wrong with my logic?
|
|
|> The GPL never says that making money is a sin.  The GPL questions certain
|
|But if you do make money, these same GNU folks leave no stone unturned
|in castigating them. Look at RedHat, SuSE, VALinux etc.


The objection is to make the software closed source and not for making the
money.
You may add Bill Gates to above list for Java.


Regards,
Mukund Deshmukh
Beta Computronics Pvt. Ltd.
Web Site - www.betacomp.com