From: "Aaron Konstam" <akonstam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Mon, 2006-06-12 at 16:08 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Mon, 2006-06-12 at 13:38 -0700, jdow wrote:
> If you want to put money on your table through honest work GPL sucks
> dead bunnies through garden hoses.
And for everything sold there must be a buyer so this is equally
true on the user side until some developer is willing to give
away the work exactly as needed. There is no good mechanism
for consumers to share the cost fairly of an incremental addition
or customization to an almost-usable GPL'd component.
--
Les Mikesell
I think then we are clear there is no money to be made in the selling of
GPL or open software, It is nice that there are people that are willing
to work to develop such software but that can't be their primary way to
make money.
And the ripoffs are the folks charging for support or for training
Spoo Certified Whazittdroids who can pretend to know as much about
Spoo Linux as the similar droids for Microsoft products pretend they
know about the Microsoft products. For everyone else it's a hobby
unless they care to work for one of the "Spoo" companies.
Note that there is nothing WRONG with it being a hobby or with
hobbies in general. But to take it more seriously than you might
take a model railroad or a hand made remote controlled B-52 model
with real jet engines and all is silly. It does mean, "If I need
Z and nobody has already created a thing that does Z I get to do
it for myself." It also sometimes means, "I think I can do better
than Z so I'll produce a ZZ adding my work to Z." Either way it
is a hobby for most people. It's real for some who work for Spoo
Linux Distro or for EFF or OSS directly. For the rest of us, do
not count on earning your bread and butter off your clever hobby.
(And do not TOUCH the source code if you want to generate a commercial
product that comes close to the part of the source code you have
touched in the past. If it looks like you copied something you're
toast.) Meanwhile, the Spoo companies are ripping those hobbiests
off in a way making money off the hobbiest's work. For those who
use the software it can be a remarkable free ride.
{^_^}
