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1. Palladian 03.23.06 / 10am

   Funny that a license like the GPL, which aims to protect the freedom of free software, actually binds licensees to a rather onerous, self-replicating denial of the ability to ever profit from any innovations they might make. While I understand the appeal and usefulness of the GPL, I dislike the idea that it places burdens on the future status of anything that might come out of it. This to me seems to discourage much significant future innovation, especially for large scale, complex software since it removes much of the incentive (the potential for remuneration and profit) to devote the necessary time and effort to a project.
2. Judson 03.23.06 / 1pm

   Well, you can profit from the software, you can even sell the software. You can also sell services around the software (like redhat, ibm). Or you can sell hardware and include software as a commodity product (ibm, sun, apple kinda). Or even better you can sell services leveraging open source code (google, amazon, ebay, yahoo) And instead of discouraging innovation it encourages it. It discourages one person from taking linux and trying to make it better to sell, but it encourages, in fact makes possible, many people working together to make it better. Free licensing isn’t for every software project. If you are a business and your core competency is creating some software you shouldn’t freely license it. But if you’re a Sun for example, and your core competency is hardware, having your software open source increases the quality of the software, your customer base, and your install base.

   Open source is for software that has become a commodity. No one will pay $50 for a browser, not many people will pay $250 for an OS (except people who have it included in the cost of their computer). These products are not where companies are making money, it’s an old market. The value has moved up the stack, to services and integration, having the commodity products be open source just helps everyone.

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