Re: Funding GPL projects or funding the GPL?

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Jul 27, 2002 at 12:42:14PM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On 27 Jul 2002, Federico Ferreres wrote:
> > It works for Microsoft and they make crappy software which is also
> 
> You want us to make crappy software with silly restrictions, too ?

Cute.  How about we ease off on this guy a bit and ask ourselves if he
doesn't have a point?  It's not clear that he has the right answer but
it is blindingly clear that pure open source business models don't work.
Every single one of them which has any success has found a way to derive
money from some other source to fund the open source development.  

You could argue that everything is fine and you'd be wrong.  Not all
applications can find a way to piggyback on some other sale.  Consider a
Word replacement, how do you generate money for that?  You can't tie it
to hardware sales, you can try the support route but that isn't going
to work, so what do you do?  And there are a million other apps which
are the same.

It's easy to beat up on this guy but he's trying to find a reasonable
compromise which allows open source to be self sustaining for all
projects.  That's a great goal.  Right now, open source funding is
a joke.  Microsoft wipes their butt with more money than all of the
open source revenue put together.  Yeah, it's very macho to say that
you'll program circles around them, but it's also wrong.  You may in
one or two areas but they have a zillion apps that lawyers and doctors
and other non-geeks use every day.  Where is the money for those apps?
It's sure as hell not coming from "donations".

So how about we all cut the guy some slack, maybe he's misdirected, maybe
he has the wrong answer, but he's not working on the wrong problem in
my opinion.  Try helping him, it might be in our best interest to do so.