Re: Realtime/embedded project to help with employment.

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca>]

"Marin David Condic" <nobody@noplace.com> wrote in message news:3F3CD4C0.4000803@noplace.com...
> Robert Leif came up with at least one mechanism for compensation in his
> ADCL. I have some reservations about it because of practical
> considerations where I think it might be difficult to get acceptance of
> it from a potential commercial exploiter. But the basic idea is sound.
>
> I could probably come up with fifty ways of handling the licensing if I
> wanted to sit here and type all day. ;-)

But are you going to have 50 lawyers check each of those ways? ;-)

> Consider this: 90% of everything someone is turning loose out there
> under the GPL has little to no commercial value. At least not enough
> that its worth trying to find someone violating your license and
> prosecuting them. So a license that allows personal/business use but not
> commercial exploitation isn't really a problem, is it?

I haven't seen any metric on this, but it really would be interesting
(you'd have to define "having commercial value" first, however).
Without disputing the actual metric, I would tend to agree (after all,
how many programs and scripts do we need to list your directories in
colour?)  In fact, I have often suggested that one way a person
or organization could make a buck, is simply to provide a very
valuable service of sorting out the neat important contributions
from the fluffy flakey stuff that has limited value (like a colour
directory lister!)  My time is valuable, so I would actually pay
for such a service, to eliminate the need to evaluate software that
I might rate as crap.

> For the remaining 10% that might have some commercial resale potential
> you merely...

There is that word "merely" - aka "just".

> have to have a mechanism for establishing a suitable license
> and collecting/distributing the fees. You form up a clearinghouse or
> foundation or whatever you want to call it - some organization that is
> going to be responsible for handling this. It has a handful of
> commercial licenses available to a potential buyer and it has some
> algorithm for parceling out the profits to the contributors of any work
> that gets purchased.

But there are still many issues left:

  - how do you split the profits? Use ASIS? What if some code is
    considered rocket science while other code is "fluffy"?
  - How do you enforce your license?  Does every vendor have to
    write their own software "lock" software?
  - How do clients move their software to new machines (do you have
    to issues new keys, or does this org do it for you? Do they
    have front line customer support staff?)
  - Does the org have lawyers?
  - Does the org enforce on your behalf (ie. sue offenders, and
    take them to court? Do they break legs when they fail to pay?)
  - Does the org defend you when the client sues you because
    of your software's [perceived] quality or failure?

I get suspicious when I hear "just" or "merely" ;-)

I doubt this idea is new. I seem to recall there was some sort of
shareware org that was supposed to work along these lines. Where is
that today?  Where is the org that you're thinking of, today?

Don't get me wrong. Just because it ain't yet, doesn't mean it
cannot be. But it is often a sign of a "hill" that must be climbed.
Just who is going to do that? RedSplat?

> Basically, if you released your work under the non-commercial license
> you'd have the option of registering the work with the clearinghouse so
> that one day, if it becomes the next Linux, RedHat comes to the
> clearinghouse and gets a resale license from them. Then you win, RedHat
> wins, the rest of the geek community wins, the clearinghouse wins,
> everybody wins.
>
> MDC

The problem is that projects like Linux, would be severely less
popular if you didn't have the compiler, tools, X Window environment
and so on to go with it. Linus only worked the kernel, and the
present kernel also has numerous other contributions. The next Linux
would be no where, if one had to pay licenses to all of the other
support that is needed in addition to the kernel.

Your idea is OK, but Linux is a poor example of what may work in
that context, IMHO. GNU/Linux is clearly a huge community effort,
which I believe would not have got off of the ground if it got
heavily mired in licensing and compensation. GPL (and variants)
work well, because everyone wins, including the author. He gets
recognition as the author, and gets to see his work included with
distributions, saving him labour in new releases later.

BTW, authors of commercial software do not always get recognition.
Much of my code is running around the planet in commercial
software. But no one would know it unless they had the source
code (or some formal "credit" was given); or they had to purchase
it from me. When you work for someone else though, this honour
is usually lost on clients of the product.

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg