🚀 go-pugleaf

Jonathan Egre' <jonathan@mantis.co.uk> writes:
>>Where is the incentive for *these* people to use the GPL?
>>I would like to "give something back" to the world, but my bills come first.

gl8f@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl) writes:
>Some people do write GPLed software to pay their bills. Just because
>you don't understand how they do it doesn't mean it's impossible.

Perhaps this is a FAQ, but that list of people is Cygnus Support,
and...?

The Cygnus model appears to be "do custom support for largish sites
that want custom support" plus "generate ports for hardwre
manufacturers".  Michael Tiemann's been in business for a while, and I
know of several outfits that pay Cygnus money, so clearly he's got
this figured out.  Are there other examples?  Note that Tiemann had
already established a bit of a reputation with G++ before starting
Cygnus, and I think this was important.  I think this means that if
you want to make money with free software, you had better consider
that "fame" has value too, and generate a little bit of it.

So, (as a partial answer to "how to make money with the GPL") consider
"fame" as an investment.

Note to anyone who's read this far -- I'm not sure that the GPL
software business model would work for something like Microsoft Word,
but I am sometimes struck by the silliness of a few dozen people doing
exactly the same work, more or less, sitting at different desks at
different companies around this Silly Valley.

David Chase
Sun