[GRASS5] Leaving

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2003 at 12:37:39PM +0100, Thierry Laronde wrote:
> I think that Markus is looking forward: it's clear that by starting with
> the Public Domain code, the licence of the future work has to be
> decided. The licence impacts:
> - The availability of the source enhancements
> - The attractivity to developers
> - The possibility for developers, and primarily the GRASS developers to
> make a living with GRASS (that is to have time to work on it because
> they get incomes from it);
> 
> The third point discards GPL: if once you have made a work, everybody
> can take it and do whatever one wants, a developer has no incitative and
> no means to be paid for what it actually does.

I strongly object to this statement!
It has already been proven to be wrong as there are people out there
making a living based on Free Software licensed under GNU GPL.
Free Software in general means that you make the money with honest
consulting and contracted development - "service provider" to put it into
a job-description and opposing it to 'product license-to-use seller'.

Of course, we are in a transition phase of product-license-to-use oriented IT
industry to service-oriented IT industry. Thus it is sometimes not easy
to sell the idea. However, it is done successfully more and more often.
And I am working hard on improving this situation further :-)

Also, I regard it unfair to implement little thingies on a huge software
and selling licenses-to-use for the whole stuff. The unfairness will
make developers more and more reluctant to contribute to a BSDish
(=non-protected) software base. In the mid-term this concept will
fail for many software application types, Full-GIS being one of them.

The special thing about GRASS is that we have to deploy it in various
industries and authorities for daily use. Once this is done,
a permanent revenue flow will even be able to pay for the base works
currently done on voluntary basis. Be patient :-)

Best

	Jan

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

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