Re: Realtime/embedded project to help with employment.

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Hyman Rosen wrote:
 >
 > That depends on what you consider RedHat's product to be. I think
 > that their product is the distribution - that is, the rational
 > assembly of the available GNU/Linux elements into a system whereby it
 >  can be readily installed, updated, and maintained, and also support
 > for that distribution.
 >
O.K. O I suppose it is all right for me to assemble various digital
recordings from the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, et alia and
come out with my own "Remember the 70's" Rock Anthology album and sell
it wherever I can. I'm providing the *exact* same "service" that RedHat
does and I owe nothing to the original artists? I got nothing of any
real value from them because its all about the packaging and
distribution? I think there would be people who would disagree with that
position. And they'd have lawyers and district attorneys behind them too.



 >
 > RedHat is a struggling company, and their profit, when they have it,
 > is tenuous.

Making a profit or not still does not alter my original claim that
RedHat got their R&D done for them free of charge. There is more to
making a profit than just R&D costs. Companies succeed or fail for all
sorts of reasons. But in starting up a new venture, that initial product
development cost is a very significant contribution to the venture.
RedHat didn't spend any of their own money building that initial
product. The developers who wrote it were the ones who funded that part
of the venture and didn't get a single share in RedHat (or any of the
other companies out there that package and sell Linux)

 >
 > The people behind BeOS followed your model. They kept their code
 > proprietary and closed, and attempted to profit off the the fruits of
 >  their labor instead of giving it away. Now the company is out of
 > business and the software is dead.
 >
Now you are misinterpreting "my model". I never said that my model had
anything to do with "proprietary" or "closed". To the extent that I have
a model, it would go like this: You can have this software in source
form and use it and modify it and share it with your friends all day
long. And I won't even *force* you to adopt my model if you decide to
build some of your own software on top of my software. Your part of the
software can be as proprietary and closed as you like. You just can't
sell it in a product or bundle it with a "service" or whatever
circumstance has my software adding value to your for-profit venture. If
you wish to do so, come see me and we'll talk turkey about how much
you'll pay me to get the right to incorporate my stuff in a for-profit
venture.

Oh, yes. I nearly forgot. Microsoft followed the model you outlined (not
mine - the proprietary and closed model) and last I checked they had
money coming out of their ... ears. Seems like that model *can* be the
right one in at least some cases.



 >
 > What you fail to see is that no one wants to be bothered with this,
 > trying to keep track of a myriad different licenses, and trying to
 > figure out what constitutes commercial gain, what constitutes making
 > bombs, and all the other idiosyncracies that people toss into their
 > licenses. Releasing under such a license will get you just as ignored
 >  as if you did not release at all.
 >
99.9% of all "open source" software out there gets ignored by commercial
efforts. (And 86% of the people who quote statistics make them up as
they go along. ;-) I also never said that companies want to deal with a
few thousand different developers or different licenses. And I think
that if you actually considered the idea as a possibility rather than
dismiss it out of hand, you might be
able to imagine a large number of ways in which it could be practical.
When you buy a book - say a dictionary that had a large number of
contributors - did you have to deal with each one to get the right to
use that book? When you listen to the radio, did you have to personally
get permission from each songwriter to use that music? Systems have been
set up to distribute copyrighted material and compensate authors that
don't leave individuals or companies having to cut a thousand deals to
use some product.



 > It's possible that things might be different if you released some
 > enormously useful piece of software under such a license that people
 > found so necessary that they would jump through hoops to get it, but
 > how many times doe sthat happen?
 >
In reality - about as often as it happens with GPLed material. Let's be
realistic here. Most of the stuff that gets released under the GPL is
really not all that special or wonderful that someone is going to pay
$$$ to get it - or even bother to use it at all. Even if it was
moderately useful, companies may look at
the GPL and not want to infect their own code with it and say "The R&D
cost to build my own unit isn't that huge, so why should I use a GPLed
unit?"

In this respect, Dr. Leif's scheme of counting code and having a
repository could be useful. It is not unlike ASCAP - pay for what you
want to use commercially and the authors get compensated through the
clearinghouse. Or it could be done through what would effectively amount
to a publishing house - buy the copyrights from the authors for some
nominal fee and pay them a royalty based on sales. In any event, you
have a point about jumping through hoops. If the effort level for the
user gets too high or the cost becomes too much, they abandon that path
and develop their own. Hence whatever scheme got adopted, it needs to be
simple and inexpensive.


 >
 > And I say again that the logistics of trying to do this, especially
 > for products which are agglomerations of hundreds of such packages,
 > are so onerous that no distributor would bother incorporating any but
 >  the most important ones.
 >
And I'll say again, Amen. And it isn't any different for GPLed code. And
once again, I'll say that a solution does exist. Your presumption is
that the model for constructing software is to have hundreds or
thousands of developers each adding little bits and pieces in a totally
uncoordinated way and someone then goes and assembles the whole
conglomerate into a product. Since it is obvious that not all software
is built this way, I'll suggest that other models might be used to
construct useful products and/or distribute them. Not all software has
much monetary value and the GPL is a fine enough way to distribute it.
If you think that what you wrote *might* have some marketable potential,
you might want to try a different model.

MDC
-- 
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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

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     "In general the art of government consists in taking as
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     to the other."

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