On Wednesday 13 February 2002 01:28 pm, Brett Glass wrote:
business. So, if the company was profitable at all, it was just squeaking through. (And $20M in annual revenues after ten years of existence is no one's idea of "good money" for a company that size.)
Sure, but they did stay in business for 10 years and were in no reported danger of going out of it. Not bad by any metric for a license you can't make money off of ;-)
Anyway to steer back toward my point, can you name any pure-BSD/X11 players that are profitable?
See, I think there's a more basic problem, which is that no known business model works really well for source-available software when the software is targeted at technically savvy users. Things like the Aladdin license are a nice compromise, but ultimately won't lead to Microsoft levels of profitability.
The solution as I see it is for GPL/BSD/whatever programmers to actually cough up something non-technical users not only would use, but would *prefer*. *Then* support and selling binaries becomes a worthwhile proposition. Codeweavers is leaning in this direction with CrossOver - even though you could probably duplicate their work eventually with the current Wine CVS, the installer and overall ease of use make it well worth paying for if you value your time at all (I bought it and I love it, if you can't tell).
To put this back on topic, I don't see any immediate benefits from a LGPL license. If we knew what the threat to Wine Jeremy hinted at was, it might make for a more informed discussion. I also liked Gav's idea about WineCorp a lot as a compromise, and I'd love to see more dicussion of that and less licensing flaming.