Ugly Huge BSD Monster

[Brett Glass]

At 02:09 AM 9/3/2003, Terry Lambert wrote:
  
>Bill Moran wrote:
>[ ... Free Code vs. Commercial Interest ... ]
>
>> Nonsense.  There are a number of companies that are making a go at it
>> with that model.  Look at Adobe with the free Acrobat viewer.  How
>> about MySQL for goodness sakes?  Redhat may not be the richest company
>> in the world, but they're riding out a lousy economy.
>
>Adobe gives away only the viewer.  They sell the creation tool,
>and they do not give away source code to the viewer.  They guard
>the file format and third party tools via vigorous enforcement
>practices utilizing all tools at their disposal, including the
>DMCA.

Exactly. And it's necessary to give away the viewer to stimulate
sales of the authoring tool. 

In short, they're not giving away what they're trying to sell.

>The MySQL people don't exactly sell software, they sell support.

[Snip]

>RedHat doesn't sell Linux.  They don't even sell documentation and
>training (though they'd desperately like to do so).  What RedHat
>sells is productization.  

[Snip]

Exactly. Which is the goal of the GPL: To prevent programmers from 
earning a decent living by being programmers. (It's OK with Stallman
if they're reduced to the level of plastic disc manufacturers or
tech support grunts.)

--Brett