Roy Schestowitz wrote:
__/ [Tim Smith] on Sunday 18 September 2005 18:04 \__
[...]
Do not associate with or mix Linux and communism. Do not say that making a
living or advertising a business is anti-OSS. If everybody advocated that
point-of-view, how would a living be made? Many of us Open Source
programmers have day jobs and, let us face it, they serve a business that
advertises and often pays for commercial software licences. This verges a
whole big essay, so let's save it for now...
Take Trolltech for example. Their dual-licensing scheme, where they
offer their toolkit both under the GPL as well as a commercial license,
seems to work pretty well. Open Source developers can use it Freely
(the biggest example being the folks behind KDE), while others (Adobe
uses it) must pay the expensive license. Except for the license, both
versions of the toolkit are identical.
A business can make money using this scheme. The biggest advantage
here, is that you get "beta testers" for free. You grant Free access to
your work, and it return, you are granted with free bug-reports. In
other words, the more people are using it, the more stable it becomes.
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