Re: Funding GPL projects or funding the GPL?

[Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>]

On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 01:01:21PM -0400, Alexander Viro wrote:
> On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > to Microsoft.  I've thought about it a lot and my attempts have pretty
> > much failed, so it's encouraging to see someone else thinking hard 
> > about this.
> 
> Larry, what the hell are you smoking?  It's a repost from tabloid, for
> fsck sake - clearly says so in the beginning.  Thinking is, indeed, hard
> for these guys, but what's encouraging about that?

Even tabloids can have good content, though I agree it's rare.
After watching all the dot com and open source companies take a
dive when it became apparent that no business model == no business,
it's somewhat nice to see someone besides myself trying to figure out
an answer which is actually sustainable.  It's not an enjoyable thing,
everyone hates you if you don't work all day long on their problems
for free, but it's a good topic for further thought.

I think that the guy is on the right track, I've frequently described
software sales as similar to insurance, noone pays what it actually costs
to handle the problem, everyone pays a little and the cost is spread
out over everyone.  The more people who pay, the less each has to pay,
and that seems to be his message.  I agree with that.  He's basically
right in theory, the problem is putting it into practice looks hard
or impossible.  But maybe someone will figure out a way, so I'm
trying to be encouraging.

Consider this my obligatory, once a year, "that's a good idea" post.
Intended to balance out the zillion other posts saying "that's braindead".  :)
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Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm