🚀 go-pugleaf

miron@cs.sfu.ca (Miron Cuperman) writes:

>Lets try some numbers.  Let us say that a company can develop software
>at a cost of $200K and sell it to 10 customers for $40K each.  Let
>us also say that they can provide support at $15K per year costing
>them $10K per year per customer.  If they "hoard" the software they
>will make $200K plus $50K per year.  If the put it under the GPL
>they will sell one copy and all the other customers will copy that.
						     ^^^^
Actually, "can" would be the right word here, and you're still making
an invalid assumption in that you say the customer _will_ copy the
software from some other customer instead of buying it from the
producer.  Most customers, especially if you're looking at specialized
software, don't have the expertise to even install a more complex
system.  Also, I see no reason why the first customer should want to
get into the software business right after having bought your
software.  This assumes that the customers are not happy, and are
willing to get into your way.

Also, the GPL tells nothing about documentation and implies no
special policies on it.  So what, any non-trivial software system will
need documentation, and the original producer is the only one who's
got the _right_ to copyleft it, but he's not required to do it.

Sure enough, the GPL does not really work for per-user or per-machine
licensing, but those kinds of software licenses are non-sensical
anyway, at least if you're looking at specialized software.  The GPL
does not work that well for standard software, but that's not the
topic.

-Hans
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