Re: Bitkeeper licence issues

Anton Altaparmakov
2002-03-19T01:45:21Z

Hi,

At 01:18 19/03/02, Roman Zippel wrote:
>Larry McVoy wrote:
> > Go read this, this is you Pavel,
> > and I'm sick of arguing with people like you.
> >
> > http://www.linuxandmain.com/essay/sgordon.html
>
>That's someone, who doesn't understand what free software is about and
>desperately looking for someone to blame it on.
>What are you trying to tell us?

Did you actually read it? I did and I agree with him. Depending on your
market niche, being a commercial company releasing free software can be
complete business suicide, killing the single, most important revenue
stream for the company.

Linux is growing and as such is being more and more commercialised and with
this we will see more and more commercial, non-free, non-GPL software. I
don't see what the fuss is all about. I am into Linux because it is a good
OS and I would like to contribute to improving it and not just because it
is free software. Free software is only good in particular market niches or
when one does it as a hobby in unsuitable market niches. Everyone has to
eat and many people have a family to support. You can't do that unless you
earn money and far too few people manage to get paid for working on free
software exactly because it is not profitable (again depending on market
niche)...

Just my 2p.

Best regards,

Anton

ps. No I am not trying to start a flame war but I felt the post was too
harsch to be left without reply.

--
"I've not lost my mind. It's backed up on tape somewhere." - Unknown
--
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @)
Linux NTFS Maintainer / WWW: http://linux-ntfs.sf.net/
ICQ: 8561279 / WWW: http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/