nemesis wrote:
> No, sorry.  It's just from my point of view. 

Actually, that's kind of a shame. I'd think such a study would be valuable 
to society.

I honestly think the GPL is probably a good approach for some types of 
software. I expect something like emacs (as one extreme example) would 
evolve very slowly if people weren't encouraged to give back repeatedly. 
Stuff that programmers and sysadmins use to do their work is ideal for this 
sort of stuff, because the GPL probably helps there. Especially with large 
projects (like compilers and editors and embeddable scripting languages) 
rather than small libraries that just help out the main program.


On the other hand, open-source tax preparation software is unlikely to ever 
go GPL, methinks. People are unlikely to want to use tax software that has 
no sort of warranty, an unbranded tax software is as suspicious to 
authorities as doing it yourself[1], the cost of building your own tax prep 
software compared to understanding someone else's is (I'm guessing) pretty 
equivalent, the user interface is going to be very important (which means 
actual usability tests and such), and it's a cash cow - you can sell the 
same software every year with relatively few changes.


In the third category is stuff like big CAD software (by which I mean stuff 
that'll perhaps even simulate the physics of the car you're driving and so 
on), maybe some kinds of scientific software libraries (protein folding or 
some such), etc. The sort of thing where some company or lab or whatever 
might write the software as part of research, then release it in PD, where 
it can grow with everyone's needs. Like Blender, for example - our output is 
movies, but our tools we can release free, so our future movies benefit from 
others improving our tools. OpenOffice kind of falls into this same 
category, except with a different initial goal. I think in this category 
you're going to see continued competition between GPL software and 
proprietary commercial software, because there's just too many features 
people will want and just too much UI and such. The commercial software will 
have architectures for plug-ins and such so others can output their favorite 
formats or drive their favorite machine tools, and the GPL software will 
continue to have exceptions allowing the result of using the tools to be 
commercially viable.


Of course, good free software can drive commercial software out of business 
(just like pirating commercial software can), but I've never heard of the 
opposite happening. So chances are it's only going to get "more free" as 
time goes on. I already see that it's very difficult to start a new small 
project in an existing environment and make any money on it. I suspect that 
few of the things you see on an iPod (in the apple store) making money would 
make any money on a desktop machine, for example, because the market is so 
saturated. If you expect to make money, you need to be associated with some 
giant company with a huge barrier to entry or risk having people with too 
much time on their hands take your designs and ideas and do just the code 
part and then give it away.



[1] I'm guessing that the IRS is more likely suspicious of individuals doing 
their own tax forms than tax forms coming from large tax preparation 
companies with reputations and deep pockets to protect.
-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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