Nadav Har'El wrote: > While I agree with you philosphically (all software should be free, etc.), > to be fair, there's a different way to look at what TrollTech, MySQL, and > others, are doing. I want to stress something further, in case it wasn't clear enough in my previous response.
I see nothing wrong in getting paid to provide different license code for which you are the owner. I have been asked to relicense free software I wrote, and I always gave a price quote. I also always made sure the price quote was high. I also made it clear that they can get the exact same code for free, and I would love to support that code for them. I even made sure that the price quote for an hour of support is less for the free version than for the proprietary version (i.e. - the one after relicensing). This has less to do with ideology, and more to do with simple economic reasoning. If I sell a proprietary license, I am effectively nullifying the advantages of the copyleft code. As such, I need to get paid for the work invested into the free code. In other words, I charge the amount it would have cost the client to get me to implement the free version from scratch, not the amount a single license costs. The same reasoning goes for the support. You buy my time to add a feature. If I add it to the free version, then that feature enhances the existing code and I benefit from it too, which means my charge is lower. I'm saying all of this just to point out that I have done relicensing for a pay (or, more precisely, offered to do) myself. That is not the part that angers me about MySQL AB. What I don't like about it is the misrepresentation. Shachar ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
