Re: Compiler business prospects

[Erich <john@peppermind.com>]

>
> Seehttp://fosdem.org/2012/schedule/event/keynotes_model_success
>
> You *can* sell GPL software and make a profit. That's just a fact.

I really didn't want to get into this discussion but I have to reply
to this, because your claim is completely misleading. The talk you
link to is about AdaCore. Sure you can make money with business-to-
business software, especially when it involves very special know-how,
but you do *not* make the money by selling the software. You are paid
for the consulting, product service, and maintenance and *not* for the
software.

I'm talking about making moderate amounts of money with non-business-
to-business, generic end-consumer software - where an executable is
deployed to Joe, the user, from a box on a shelf or via download and
payment by a payment service provider (Paypal, Kagi, etc.). This kind
of software does not require any consulting or services, because it
works out-of-the-box and does not require any skills to operate. For
example, I'm currently working on a word processing application with
unique features for creative writers such as style checking, "dark
room" minimal user interface, automatic backup and versioning,
automatic project management, extremely fast notetaking and search
functions, etc. The only way you could make money with that under GPL
was with a ridiculously large user base (>1 million, which means a few
people might pay for charity) or, say,  by convincing the US
government to buy 10000 copies+5 year maintenance contract. <-- Joke

Anyway,  I welcome it when other people make money with GPL software
but in many of not most cases, and certainly in mine, this is an
utterly unrealistic perspective.

> AFAIU, Qt has been licensed under LGPL since 2009.

LGPL does not allow static linking with the executable. I was assuming
that QtAda statically links with the Qt libraries, and anyway GMPL/
=LGPL, both of which seems to imply that the GMPL version of QtAda
must be based on the commercial version of Qt.