On Friday 22 July 2005 03:43 am, Richie Hindle wrote: > > a mere $29.90, except it is GPL'd so I'm not sure what the money is for > "Tech support [...] free forever for registered users."
Hmm. Though that raises the old spectre of charging a fixed price for a "loss center". > But I've often wondered whether you could charge for mass-market GPL software > simply because your ordinary punter doesn't know what the GPL is, and doesn't > mind paying a small amount of money for decent software. Whether it's > ethical, given that presumably the thing is GPL because it inherits GPL code > from other developers, I don't know. Certainly the GPL itself has no > objection to charging for binaries provided you ship the source as well. Sure it's ethical. I suspect most GPL developers would love to see it work. Of course, you might have to worry about them pre-empting you. ;-) The problem is that competition will tend to drive the price to the marginal cost of distribution. By tacking on a value-added feature (printed documentation or tech support), you are improving the "production quality" of the copy you are selling, which means you can (sustainably) charge a bit more. Still hard to make money at it, though. -- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
