worley@compass.com (Dale Worley) (07/16/90)
X-Name: Eric Schnoebelen
Sounds like a popular compliant.. A lot of people don't
understand, and therefore won't come near, the GPL. My reading of the
GPL says that you can ship the software licensed under it, as long as
you don't charge extra for it, and you make the source available.
Unfortunately, one common misunderstanding is that people believe that
you can't charge for GPL software. The fact is, that you can charge
anything you like, but since you can't prevent your buyers from
redistributing it, if you charge $1M, your market will consist of
exactly one sale.
What terrifies the lawyers is the "stickiness" of GPL software -- if a
routine gets copied from GPL code into, say, the Domain kernel, and
Apollo ships it, then all of Apollo's customers gain the right to copy
and sell the Domain kernel. Given that software is getting to be far
more valuable than the hardware it runs on, this threatens a company
with death.
As far as support and other hassles goes, a business is quite sane to
not want to get into the loop for anything if distributing it does not
improve the value of its software *in the eyes of the people who buy
it*. The way to get Apollo to ship Perl is to get Apollo's customers
to ask for it.
Dale Worley Compass, Inc. worley@compass.com
--
I've gone to hundreds of fortune-tellers' parlors, and have been told
thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready
to arrest her.
--New York City Detective