🚀 go-pugleaf

Several people have commented that they are surprised that copylefted
software can be profitable.

Note:

1) There is nothing in the copyleft that says that you can't sell
   copylefted software and charge lots of bucks. 
   
   Its just that, since the copyleft forces you to transfer all rights 
   to the software when you sell it, the person that you sell it to
   can turn around and do whatever with it: sell it for more than s/he
   paid, give it away, or mass market it. The law of supply and demand
   can take over here pretty quickly.

2) Such a scenario does not, however, address the ``extra'' something
   that all software purchasers desperately need: support, updates,
   documentation, and maintenance.

   Notice that the above are not supplied uniformly with gnu products:
   documentation is a joke and support is on a ``pretty please'' basis.
   Updates come very regularly and maintenance has also been very good---
   three cheers for the authors and support personel who make such
   distribution work!

   The gods of the FSF have envisioned that such services should/would
   be sold---hackers have to make a living---but such sales would
   be direct application of programmer effort, not hoarding of software.

Does this make sense? Remember, the ``Free'' in Free Software Foundation
doesn't mean ``free of cost'', just ``free from encumberance''. Should
they change their name?

kurt
-- 
Kurt Baudendistel --- GRA
Georgia Tech, School of Electrical Engineering, Atlanta, GA  30332
internet: baud@eedsp.gatech.edu         uucp: gatech!gt-eedsp!baud