On Tue, 25 Apr 2000 17:10:46 -0700, Ken wrote:
>
>"Peter J. Holzer" wrote:
>
>> This is correct. However, since you cannot keep anyone from
>> distributing a GPL'ed program, you cannot make make money by selling
>> the program itself. If you sell the program for $1000, somebody
>> will just burn it on 1000 CDs and sell them for $10 each. You can,
>> however, make money by distributing the software ("POVray + printed
>> manual for only $29"), by giving support ("Problems with POVray? You
>> can call us 24x7 for only $1000 per month"), or by improving it ("You
>> need NURBS and you need them next month? We'll implement them for
>> only $10000").
>
>And think of the customer service problems this creates for the current
>developers of POV-Ray. Someone gets a modified version of the program
>and finds bugs in it. They discover povray.org on the net and fire off
>a bug report.

This doesn't seem to be much of a problem for most GPL software. Patches
usually either get merged back into the main source pretty quickly or
stay obscure. Source splits are rare, but when they happen (Emacs vs.
XEmacs, gcc vs. egcs vs. pgcc) it is usually quite clear that the
programs have different maintainers. Also note that the POV license
doesn't forbid to distribute modified versions of POVray, so this could
happen anyway (yes, I know the "This is an unofficial version of povray"
message).

Of course you can choose to license your program under whatever
conditions you like. I am just wondering why you feel that the GPL isn't
suitable, given that it has worked well for a lot of people for at least
15 years or so.

	hp

-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer    | Nicht an Tueren mangelt es,
|_|_) | Sysadmin WSR       | sondern an der Einrichtung (aka Content).
| |   | hjp### [at] wsracat      |    -- Ale### [at] univieacat
__/   | http://www.hjp.at/ |       zum Thema Portale in at.linux

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