Re: [OT] mothers, free software

[Benno]

On Thu Nov 17, 2005 at 19:33:12 -0500, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
>On Fri, 2005-11-18 at 09:14 +1100, Benno wrote:
>> >>From a business perspective, the risk of free software is that your
>> >competitor can use your code against you. The benefit of free software
>> >is that your competitor cannot undercut you on price, which makes you
>> >very very hard to dislodge from your market position unless you screw up
>> >pretty badly.
>> 
>> Sleepycat seem to be an example to the contrary. They make most
>> of their money frmo licensing their GPLed software. (I can find the
>> reference if anyone is interested.. I'd need to dig through my 
>> email though.)
>
>The last time I talked to Margo and Keith about this, Sleepycat's main
>revenue source was from *non*-free licenses. They use a dual license.
>The pattern seems to be that a vendor develops something using the GPL
>version and then pays for a proprietary license so that they don't have
>to release the rest of their code.
>
>I'ld be interested to know if that situation has changed.
>

Right, but to me that is making money directly off the free software. The
software is also available under the GPL, people choose
not to use it under that ilcense and instead op to pay for the free software.

And by free I mean fee-as-in-speech, not free-as-in-beer because if you
go with free-as-in-beer you can't by definition make money of it, so that
what be a totally pointless conversation anyway.

Benno