[Ilugc] We Don't Need the GPL Anymore (fwd)
- From: ee01b098@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Ayan Chakrabarti)
- Date: Sat Jul 2 18:39:38 2005
On Sat, 2 Jul 2005, Anand Saha wrote:
You can not earn your bread and butter by just writing code
and giving it away under GPL. You need to build a support/
maintenance mechanism around your product to make users pay
you for reliable support.
Yes you can, if you're writing it for a company that needs quality
software on its platform fast. You can earn money writing a verilog
synthesizer for a company that makes FPGAs. You benefit by cutting down on
your development time by using Icarus Verilog, and the company pays you
because it wants something which does place and route for their hardware.
You can earn money writing operating systems for new hardwares / servers.
IBM pays you to write quality software because it helps their platform.
They make hardware but don't want their customers to have to shell out
extra money to buy IIS, which probably is quite crappy anyway. So they
hire you to improve apache, mysql, etc.
You can earn money by writing compilers for different kinds of processors.
You get to use gcc and not re-invent the wheel, the company gets a
compiler which optimizes for their kind of hardware and gets to show of
their superior products.
You might attach a price tag with with your GPLed product but one
customer and the second clause of GPL is enough to make sure
that you are paid only once. Correct me if i am wrong.
Not Necessarily. For example, if you're working as a contract programmer
making software for a big company, you sell them your program and give the
code with it. This does not automatically imply that they'll redistribute
it on the net. And you benefit from having spent a lot less time in
writing that code.
--Ayan
Other related posts:
