Re: [ba-ohs-talk] More bad news about the GPL License: Fwd: [Gxl] GCC Licencing and XML extracts
Coming recently from Sun Microsystems
I can say that there is a struggle there to understand how to build
a justifiable business model that includes open source, (01)
There are many small companies that are successful doing free software
support and development. I heard that there were 50 in France alone.
Whether this can be extended to a company as big as Sun, I don't know.
I hope that it is, but I don't know. (02)
What I do know is that that question does not have the same importance
for the free software movement as it has for the open source movement. (03)
In the open source movement, it is a central question, because they
stake everything on the claim that open source development is
profitable. Whenever that is not so, for them it is a fundamental
failure. (04)
In the free software movement, it is not a central question, because
our position is that non-free software is antisocial and free software
is an ethical imperative. If it is not profitable for a certain large
company to do free software development, that is a practical setback
for us, but nothing deeper than that. We say, "We'll get that free
software developed some other way." (05)