Re: Economics and the GPL

Deven T. Corzine wrote:

>It's voluntary for now.  But once you choose to use the GPL, you can't go 
>back and change your mind later without starting over from scratch and even 
>competing against your OWN code!
>  
>

Not entirely correct.  You do not have to start over from scratch: you 
own the copyright on your own code.  You may choose to release your own 
code under another license as well.  (You cannot release other people's 
code under another license unless given explicit permission.)  You 
cannot remove your own GPLd code from distribution, so you *will* have 
to compete against your own code, but you don't have to start from scratch.

>To be exacting about this, the GPL is just as "proprietary" as Microsoft's 
>EULA is.  The proprietor (such as it were) of GPL code is the community of 
>developers willing to operate under the restrictions of the GPL, rather 
>than a single legal entity.  In fact, it is the coercion within the GPL 
>which makes it proprietary -- the BSD and X11 licenses are not proprietary.
>
>It's quite ironic, actually.  Stallman rants about the evils of proprietary 
>software while creating yet another enclave of proprietary code that others 
>need to be cautious of.  BSD developers have a more honest claim to being 
>against proprietary code than Stallman does.
>
>It's funny that this never occurred to me before now.  It's quite obvious.
>  
>

You've discovered the core difference between the GPL and BSD: the GPL 
is written with the idea that groups of people will collaborate on 
software, with the idea that no-one can exploit the group effort without 
participating in the group.  The BSD is written with the idea that 
groups of people will collaborate on software, but anyone is allowed to 
exploit the code.  That is the difference.

The GPL is hardly proprietary to the extent you claim; it does not allow 
for code sharing back to other "open-source" licenses, and that is the 
biggest flaw.  BSD folks get upset because the GPL is allowed to use 
code from BSD, which is explicitly allowed withing the BSD license, but 
won't give code back to BSD.  This is ironic, considering they don't get 
upset when commercial developers do exactly the same thing.

"Proprietary" means

*2* *:* something that is used, produced, or marketed under exclusive 
legal right of the inventor or maker; /specifically/ *:* a drug (as a 
patent medicine) that is protected by secrecy, patent, or copyright 
against free competition as to name, product, composition, or process of 
manufacture.

The GPL is none of these things, as users are granted a non-exclusive 
right.  In fact, users are not allowed to make anything exclusive.  So 
the GPL is innately anti-proprietary.  The BSD is pro-proprietary, in 
that it does not forbid creating an exclusive license.  Microsoft 
products are just proprietary.

>The code still benefits more people if more people are using it, even if 
>some of those users are paying for proprietary versions of the code.  And a 
>proprietary version doesn't need to offer "many" compelling features, only 
>a single one.  And that feature might well be support or documentation, not 
>necessarily code.  Anything the user is willing to pay for.
>

This is fine, until someone in a dominant position takes the code and 
extends it in an incompatible fashion.  This is what Microsoft attempted 
with Kerberos last year.  In this way, because of their current market 
dominance, they can make it painful to use any version of Kerberos but 
their own, thereby making worthless the original code.

The BSD license assumes everyone will play fair.  The GPL requires 
everyone plays fair.

>Many have tried to make all sorts of business models with with the GPL, yet 
>none have been fantastically successful.  Make all the arguments you want, 
>but history isn't being terribly supportive of the business case for using 
>the GPL.  I'm not saying it's impossible to make a profit this way, but it 
>has tended to be relatively disappointing, and we have to ask why.
>  
>
Please define "fantastically successful."  First is Cygnus, a private 
company purchased by Red Hat.  Cygnus lasted a decade customizing and 
porting GCC to new platforms.  Cygnus never made a killing, but it was 
profitable those 10 years.

Red Hat itself is not doing badly.  The fact it is still around is a 
testament to the strength of their business model, when other OS 
companies like Be have gone out of business.  ("But Be was driven out of 
business by Linux!" I hear you cry.  Rubbish. Jean-Louis Gassee himself 
attributed Be's demise to Microsoft's stronghold, in 
http://lists.essential.org/1999/info-policy-notes/msg00005.html .)

Right now, GPLd software will not make many millionaires.  I will not 
deny that.  But what gives programmers the right to be millionaires? 
 Most plumbers or electricians will never be millionaires.  Neither will 
most accountants, nor teachers, nor even civil engineers.  What's wrong 
with just making a good living?

>Maybe one platform is proprietary and the other isn't, but each serves the 
>same purpose ultimately, and for the purposes of the product in question, 
>the user might not care about the platform.  Consider a device like the 
>TiVo -- it's a standalone box which serves certain functions; it matters 
>little to the user what the underlying platform is.  It's a black box.
>

Oooo, bad choice of examples.  Tivo is limited in some respects, and so 
some people have hacked it.  Did you know you can now bypass the dialup 
requirement by installing an ethernet card (or a *wireless* ethernet 
card)?  Strange but true.  That's good for people like me who do not 
have a local Tivo dialup number.  Other people like a web interface.  So 
they've added a web server, and can control Tivo from work (say, they 
just remembered Zalazny's Amber series starts tonight on SCI-FI and they 
need to tell Tivo to record it).

Tivo the company wins because they had a ready hardware solution for 
broadband connectivity when they released Tivo V2.  This was a win-win 
situation for *everyone* involved.

The reason it was so easy to hack was because we have some creative 
people in the world, and because the underlying source code is freely 
available.  This is *exactly* the sort of situation for which RMS 
created the GPL: hardware is limited by its software, and creative geeks 
fix it to their liking.  We are not left to the whims of the producer.

>It's possible that the competitor will choose to use the GPL and ultimately 
>go out of business as a result of that choice.  If it turns out that using 
>the GPL can't sustain a viable business model, should each competitor in 
>that market go out of business as well, just to be able to use the GPL code 
>and keep up with the competition until they fail?
>
>Deven
>
>  
>

If this is true, the GPL will die before it destroys the industry.  If 
it is not true, then your reasoning is incorrect.  Either way, you win. 
 We currently do not have enough information to definitively judge one 
way or the other.  (Well, *I* have enough information for myself.  But 
YMMV, as with everything in life.)

                    - Tony