[time-nuts] Open source

David Kirkby david.kirkby at onetel.net
Sat Dec 8 08:44:21 UTC 2012


On 8 December 2012 01:09, Chris Albertson <albertson.chris at gmail.com> wrote:

> BTW you CAN make as much money as you like with GPL'd software.  Just look
> at all Android phones.  They contain Linux and a pile of other GPL'd
> software.  Apple is using BSD Unix in there products.

That's an important point, and something the person that wrote the
GPSDO software might like to consider.

You don't need to be the size of Apple to make money from GPL. Plenty
of people earn money from providing support for  GPL software. There
are numerous consultants for R (statistics package), Apache (web
server), Wireshark (network analysis) etc. I've made money by selling
support for a GPL program I wrote.

http://atlc.sourceforge.net/

with hindsight, I could have probably made more, as a commerical
company contacted me, asking if I could license it under the LGPL so
they could use it in their closed-source commerical software. I
refused. But with hindsight, I could have sold them a license to use
it in their closed source application.

As a company, if you use GPL software, you are not tied to one vendor.
If there is a feature you want, you can eitiher add it yourself, ask
the original author to add it, or if need be pay someone else to add
it.

Dave



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