begin quoting Michael O'Keefe as of Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 04:04:40PM -0700: > >The GPL discourages* businesses from producing software -- there's no > >good way to recoup costs. Third-party vendors can, will, and do > >undercut your training prices; printed manuals are passe, and people > >want electronic manuals instead; media will be duplicated, and shared > >in a heartbeat. > > > >*Note that I'm not saying prohibit; but in general, the market is pretty > >damn small, especially outside of hardware vendors. > > That is just "old school","pay me for the right to use" mentality.
Well, folks have this old-school need to eat... yah, it's quaint and archaic, but there you go. > Use a different business model other than "selling the right to use the > software" Many of those models are worse still. Give away the software and sell technical support is soul-draining for the developer and encourages bad software (to improve the amount of necessary support). Give away the software and sell advertising is soul-draining for the user AND the developer, but seems to be the current favored model. Too bad we can't leverage the web-comic model of "give away the comic and sell merchandising" for software. -- We need better logos. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
