Re: Ada Developer's Cooperative License (was) Re: Market pressures for more reliable software

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

Well, assume for a minute that I write some code under ADCL and make it
available on the net. You pick it up and include it in your end product -
initially at no charge. My code (as measured by the ASIS tool) constitutes
10% of the overall product's source code. (No need to get into the fact that
some code is more valuable than others - no system can be perfect & if it
was *really* valuable, people would negotiate their own deals outside of
ADCL anyway.) To keep things simple:

You price your shrink-wrapped product at $100.
You sell 1000 units.

a) How much do I get?
b) Who do you write a check to so that I ultimately get paid?
c) How do I know that you didn't actually sell 10,000 units and are only
claiming 1000?

Change the scenario a little.

You now sell 1,000,000 at $10. (Wholesale or retail?) Do I still get the
same percentage even though your costs are now near totally in the
manufacture & distribution of the product, not in the engineering of it? You
might be making only a modest profit while taking an enormous risk, while I
sit back nearly risk free collecting X% of every retail sale? I could
imagine where 90% of the code came from ADCL sources and the entrepeneur who
pulled it all together only has 10% "glue" code involved - yet is still
stuck with all the production, marketing and distribution costs.

I suppose some models do exist: Musicians/Recording Artists get some
percentage of the sale of the "software" they author & record. It has to
sometimes be split among other musicians who contributed in a substantive
way to the software being sold. There's ASCAP as the clearinghouse for
paying/distributing the fees. The whole thing depends on basic honesty,
relatively low cost to be honest and the fear of how expensive it would be
to get caught cheating.

Another model is how people price out an RTOS like VxWorks or WinCE. Here
you're in effect buying the right to embed these things in your product the
same as if it were under ADCL (without source, maybe) and you have to pay
some sort of fee for each unit. Its a direct relationship between customer
and supplier, so no ASCAP-like thing is needed, but at least things like
volume discounts could be looked at as a model.

I don't think I would demand a *perfect* system for sharing in the success
of a software product, but my fear is that if the system is too unjust,
costly or difficult, it won't take long for most people to conclude that
they'd rather not have anything to do with it. I'd love to have 10% of Linux
being my code and have the right to some relative percentage of each unit
distributed by Red Hat, et alia, but would they have put any effort into
Linux as a commercial endeavor if the costs to be paid to me, et alia,
started becoming some major chunk of the overall fees charged? (Maybe there
needs to be some sort of "Volume Discount" built into it so that the fees
decrease roughly at the same rate that the engineering costs dilute over the
production run? Otherwise a company will just swollow the cost of
engineering whole - reinventing the wheel - rather than use the resources
available under ADCL.)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." <rleif@rleif.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.992544799.21844.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...
> From: Bob Leif
> To: Marin David Condic et al.
>
> A good first step is to either have a birds of a feather meeting at SIGAda
> 2001 or if I am given the opportunity during a workshop on "Creating a
> Symbiotic Relationship Between XML and Ada". The software discussed during
> this workshop could serve as the basis for future mainstream commercial
> products.
>
> As far as the mechanism is concerned, it is really a simple but imperfect
> solution. The first assumption is that the sources for the commercial Ada
> programs will be available. The second assumption is that an ASIS
> application can be created that calculates the relative contribution of
each
> developer to a project. The third is that an imperfect, but predictable
> objective calculation will be preferred by developers to individual,
> expensive optimized negotiations. You may get less money; but, you will
not
> have to pay a lawyer and perhaps an accountant upfront. The second
> assumption has the weakness that we can achieve a consensus on the
relative
> values of individual types of Ada source. This probably will need to
include
> some type of arbitration procedure.
>
> The benefits are that individual software engineers are treated as
investors
> not, as Karl Marx aptly put it, as wage slaves. The benefit to the
> capitalist entrepreneur is that for a small upfront cost, one has the
chance
> to become rich. I might note from previous business experience that the
> capitalist should contribute significantly more than money and not be just
a
> passive investor.
>