I don't think it's a bad idea to make something partly commercial. >From the moral point of view I may cite Richard Stallmann ( http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html ):
> Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should > not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should > charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a > misunderstanding. > > Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software > <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html> to charge as much as they > wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on. > Making money of opensource is not a bad thing. One can sell service, support and simple methods to work everything out of the box and maybe some nice extras. The people who don't need this fancy stuff and are able to type 'make' in their shell can still download the source and get everything working on their own. That's the way many commercial Open Source projects like Red Hat Enterprice, Android, or even Numpy work. What should be avoided is of course making parts of the 'core' sage closed source. This should only maybe affect maybe some webapp stuff. (Why not sell a nice app on Google play?) Sage is made from volunteer work, and taking money for service is fine, as long active developers who spend their freetime in making sage better still have the right to get their software free of charge, and don't have drawbacks in using it. On Friday, August 15, 2014 10:42:14 AM UTC+2, Dr. David Kirkby (Kirkby Microwave Ltd) wrote: > > As I understand it, the SageMathCloud is closed source. Yet it is > making extensive use of open-source code. Maybe the closed source bits > don't link to the open-source bits, though I find it a bit hard to > believe. If it did not link, it would not that be against the GPL? Or > I guess if the code is not distibuted, but only kept on a server, it > probably gets around the GPL. > > If not against the GPL, this certainly seems to be going against the > *spirit* of the Sage project. It looks as though the intention is to > charge for access to a web service which makes use of open-source code > developed by many - myself included. > > One might argue it is the same with any web service making use of > Apache for example, although I still think a closed-source > SageMathCloud is pushing the limits of what some (myself included), > find morally acceptable. > > The only comment on the Wikipedia talk page > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:SageMathCloud > > says "Unfortunately, some part of it is becoming closed source. And, > they will charge for the many of the services..." I don't know who > wrote that, but it was not me. > > Maybe it is legal. I don't think it is morally right. > > Dave > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
