Re: GPL vs. sweatshops (was Re: Bias)

At 10:26 AM 7/15/02 -0400, Deven T. Corzine wrote:

>Keep in mind that Mozilla and OpenOffice were commercial products (Netscape
>and StarOffice) that were released freely as a calculated business risk to
>take down Microsoft.  AOL/Netscape and Sun aren't getting a direct return
>proportional to their costs involved, but instead they're betting that if
>they can weaken Microsoft's hold on the market, it will be worth the huge
>loss they've incurred by releasing that commercial code.

Huge loss?
Netscape was already freely available when it was still closed source. If 
they charged for it they wouldn't have a chance against Microsoft internet 
explorer. In the case of OpenOffice Sun still sells the proprietary version 
Staroffice 6.0. So I don't think that they are losing that much. In fact if 
OpenOffice is widely adopted it may even boost Staroffice6.0 because both 
interoperate perfectly. And there are lots of companies who would rather 
pay for Staroffice instead of getting free OpenOffice because they want the 
corporation support(of SUN).

Roland