Re: Total Joy of Ownership

[Arun Sharma <adsharma@xxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, May 26, 1999 at 12:31:19PM +0530, Atul Chitnis wrote:

> Linux cannot survive as a corporate contender if there is no money in it for
> anyone. "Free" is the biggest ball and chain Linux has today - if vendors do
> not find sustained commercial interest in Linux, they will drop it like a
> hot brick. And that would mean (for us here in India) no GT Enterprises, no
> PC Quest, no Linux in every book/computer store, no corporate interest, no
> push by companies like IBM/Oracle/Intel/Compaq/Dell/Wipro/HCL/etc.

If you believe in capitalistic theories, this is a _very_ valid
point. Over here in the US, the word communist is a dirty one. GPL is
often accused of "reeking of communism" on comp.os.linux.advocacy.

Anyways, in the GPL world, the only way people can make money is 
using support and other peripheral stuff. If I were to invent a cool
algorithm to make Linux do job X, 20 times faster, there is no way
I'll be rewarded for it. The moment I release it in an open source manner,
cheapbytes will burn a CD.

To put it in a different way, just because Linux is making headlines, the
commercial closed/properietary world is not going to come to an end. Linux
or any other wannabe MS contender has to learn to co-exist with closed
(non open source) software. And GPL refuses to do just that. 

If you read www.gnu.org and the philosophy etc, GPL goes out of the way
to make it hard to co-exist with non-free software. This is what worries
me. Something to think about when you write free software next.

Note that I'm not bashing GPL here. Linus probably made the right decision
in GPL'ing Linux. It's success speaks for itself. But making Gnome/KDE GPL'ed
has larger implications. It might make it impossible to write commercial
software using those libraries - which would be a big blow to Linux. 
(Ref: The infamous 10 line clause in LGPL)

Views mine only.

	-Arun


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