Re: Making money from free software [was Re: An Ada IDE and discussions]

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

That seems a kind of disingenuous fiction. Suppose you wrote your
autobiography and put it out in book form. I pick up your book and say "This
would make a marvelous movie!", so I hire actors, translate your book into a
screenplay, build the sets, produce the movie, market it and make millions
at the boxoffice on your life's story. Would you say that I did *not*
capitalize on your efforts? After all, I pulled together all the pieces and
assembled the finished work - the fact that you originally wrote the book is
no different that if you originally wrote some significant part of Linux.

Or would you think it was inherently fair for someone to pick up books at
the library (free!) and turn them into movies and make money on them without
paying the authors anything? It seems an analogous situation. Granted, the
authors of GPL code have given their permission for this to happen, so it
isn't illegal and they have little right to complain about it now. But it
doesn't sound like a scenario that I'd want to sign up for personally.

I'm not saying that Red Hat, et alia, don't deserve to make money for their
part in integrating all the pieces and distributing it to the world. They
put capital at risk and invested labor in the process. But I think the
original authors have some non-zero contribution to this and that by virtue
of the GPL license, they don't share financially in any of the rewards. I'd
like to think that if I were to contribute some non-zero share to a
company's product, that I'd get some non-zero payback in the process.

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/


"Matthias Benkmann" <mbenkmann@gmx.de> wrote in message
news:3b55c03c.15655171@news.cis.dfn.de...
>
> And about the money-making issue: You misinterpret things slightly.
> When Red Hat puts together a Linux distro and sells it, it is *NOT*
> making money of the works of the developers who wrote the programs
> contained in the distro.
> All of those programs are available for free download.
> Unless Red Hat customers are total idiots who don't know that they can
> download the software for free, these customers are obviously *NOT*
> paying for the software. Only an idiot pays for something he can
> download for free.
> So Red Hat is *NOT* capitalizing on the effort made by the developers
> of the software. What people ARE paying for is the effort that Red Hat
> put into collecting all this software, compiling it (have you ever
> tried to build a Linux distro as complete as Red Hat's from scratch?
> Have you ever even tried to locate and download all those packages
> manually?) and making it (relatively) easy to install and maintain.
> This is 100% Red Hat's effort. The developers of the software have not
> contributed to this in the least. In fact the developers of the
> software are the reason why Red Hat is needed. These developers make
> installing the software a hard piece of work. So all the money Red Hat
> makes is 100% Red Hat's money. I don't see why any of the developers
> should get a dime for something that they didn't do.
> If they want that money, they should create their own distro. No one's
> stopping them.
>