Roland wrote:
I just don't understand one thing: How does your company expect to make money once WINE is
xGPLed? If all your
code has to be contributed back, why should I buy it from
your company?
The same way many companies work also with their properiteary code. You know your code needs a feature but you don't have the time for implementation because you have no customer who says he really needs it. Of course many customers may be gald to have it, but none is willing to pay for it. The someday a customer turns up who says he needs that stuff badly and he wants to know how much you charge for it. Then you implement that feature, you might have implemented anyway some day, and once it is available you can give it to all your customers, or you can charge a price that others are willing to pay even though they wouldn't have paid the develeopment price. I worked for a company that worked exactly that same way
Actually I work for a company that works this way as well for some of our products.
and this works also for GPL code as well.
No, it won't. There is nothing save ignorance that would make the other customers pay for it when can have it for free.
Granted most customers are ignorant (as far as software development is concerned). But building a viable business model of it is not possible. If just somebody in the world realizes the flaw he can contact the companies in question and point this out to them and for a fee do the work of recompiling their application for them.
Patrik Stridvall wrote:
No, it won't. There is nothing save ignorance that would make the other customers pay for it when can have it for free.
Granted most customers are ignorant (as far as software development is concerned). But building a viable business model
That's why they are customers and not developers. A customer is exactly for this reason a customer because he is fairly ignorant (or incapable) of doing the job he needs to support his business and many customers don't want to have this knowledge because their job is another thing than developing code.
of it is not possible. If just somebody in the world realizes the flaw he can contact the companies in question and point this out to them and for a fee do the work of recompiling their application for them.
You are assuming here, that any given customer will sit and wait until a suitable patch is released. That may be true for many and that's what I wrote about my earlier job in my previous mail. But if this is an important feature than he will pay for it because he needs to. If this is released for others this is no problem because for others apparently it may not be that vital otherwise they would have paid for it in the first place.
Another implicit assumption here is that customers pay for a given piece of code. In my opinion they are often not doing that. Instead they pay for a service. They pay for the service that they have someone whom they can contact and who will code if neccessary. So even if they use an OS code that doesn't imply that they never again will pay for any service based on the assumption that any given functionality they will need will turn up sooner or later. Most larger customers (and I think that's the one who are intersting for business models) are not willing to bet their business on the fancy of some developers. They want to have plans they can follow so they in turn can tell their customers when and how a given problem will be solved. That's why xGPL also works for companies.
I was once arguing with collegues because they maintained that if MS gave their code for Word to OS then nobody would buy Word anymore and they couldn't make any money from it. I stil say, and that is the point here as well, that this is not true. Private indivudals won't pay anymore, but usually they are not the money anyway. Really large companies, with their own development staff might also choose to develop and maintain themself, and there may be some loss. But the majority of smaller companies would still pay for the service of maintainence and for adding features they need and I bet that even bigger companies who could afford their own development wouldn't choose to do that. Why should they? It's more sensible to let somebody develop that who know about it. The code is there as an insurance should the developer ever go down, but not for developing by everybody else.
-
Gerhard W. Gruber -
Patrik Stridvall