🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <iRNaeB6w164w@mantis.co.uk> mathew@mantis.co.uk (en font terrible) writes:
> > >With Microsoft and other commercial licenses, I can use the sample source
> > >code provided in any way I like, and I can do whatever I want with programs
> > >which I have written and linked using their libraries.
> > 
> > Is the first part of this statement really true?  For example, can you
> > take bits of their source code and put them into a program that you
> > are going to sell (without the need to make retribution to them in any
> > way)?  That doesn't sound right to me.

Commercial software vendors have improved their behaviour a lot in
response to the market's demands, competition, and alternatives like GNUware.

Back in the dark ages (not totally gone now, but this was fairly
common even 5 years ago) many vendors of programming tools would
require you to pay royalties if you sold products developed with their tools;
the final product might include one of their object libraries, or a
small run-time driver like a yacc-or-bison parser, or a big run-time
driver like an APL interpreter or form-and-menu driver - I think some
even required royalties for pure object code generated by their compilers.

The theory was that *you* are benefitting by using their product,
since it lets you produce a product faster or better than without
their help, and your customer is benefitting from it also,
so you'll be willing to pay for the benefit.  Kind of like Amway soap :-(

In practice, while that may be a fair way to do things in the
free-market sense (if you didn't think so, you wouldn't buy it),
it's annoying enough for commercial customers that most people will
buy almost *any* competing product that doesn't require it,
and non-commercial customers who write free software obviously can't use it.
Here in a large bureaucracy, if I want to produce something for a
customer (whether internal or external), *I* wouldn't use something
like that - I'd have to convince our bean-counters keep track of how
many copies had been delivered to whom, and make sure cash flows back
to the original vendor.  It's *much* cleaner to pay for a royalty-free
product up front.  

The main form in which this kind of charging sticks around seems to be for
"large" well-defined systems like a DBMS or non-bundled operating
system or window system, where the end-user is buying a platform that
will support a number of applications, and occasionally for run-time
versions of the same thing.  

If memory serves me correctly, even AT&T now lets anybody include the yacc
parser in yacc-derived code without requiring that the end-user have a
Unix license - it placed too strong a restiction on the code people
could write otherwise, and the market didn't like it.
-- 
				Pray for peace;      Bill
#Bill Stewart +1-908-949-0705 erebus.att.com!wcs AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 Holmdel NJ
# learning GNUS/gnuemacs - blame any content-free postings on typos :-)
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