[Lula] What I've been doing lately...

[ted at gould.cx]

On Mon, 29 May 2006, Christopher Smith wrote:
> Ted Gould wrote:
> I've got a whole bunch of free, but closed-source software from DirecTV
> in the form of my access card.

Well, that really isn't that good of an example, because you do pay for 
that access card.  It's like you pay for a cell phone through your two 
year commitment, even though it isn't a line item on your bill, you are 
paying for it.  You don't care which parts of the functionality in your 
cell phone is implemented in hardware or software, just that it'll make 
calls (and that you can buy $2 ring tones regularly :)

Likewise, you don't think that Windows is gratis because you buy a laptop 
from Dell and it comes with Windows.

> "Free as in beer" software, when developed, owned and supported by a
> profit-making enterprise, tends to be distributed for free because it
> enhances the value of a for-profit product. When the product isn't also
> "free as in speech", it is often because this property helps prevent
> enterprising developers from severing the link between the "free as in
> beer" software and the for-profit product.

I think this is a little bit of a misnomer.  Yes, if your business model 
is to have a 'normal' and a 'pro' version, and keep easily implmentable 
features out of your 'normal' version, open sourcing it is a problem.

But, let's look at applications like Firefox.  I'm not sure how much 
Google pays to make sure they're the default search in Firefox, but I'm 
guessing it's more than zero.  And, I could download the sourcecode and 
disable Google being the default search engine and then distribute an 
alternative version of Firefox.  To my knowledge, no one has done this. 
That says to me, that even in Open Source, branding is important and that 
having software that includes a brand gives it some momentum where a fork 
would be discouraged.

 		--Ted

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