Re: Off-topic was: Re: Licensing question
On 22 Feb 1999, John Hasler wrote:
> So they go to the originator, he sells them candles, and your rental
> business goes down the tube.
But he sells candles for $100,000 each (with the method for making them)
and you only have $1 and want to read, not make candles) The only people
that are going to buy the candles are the people that want to sell the USE
of them. They are going to guard the method of making them to keep their
candlelight business going strong. If they atempt to go into the
candlemaking business, they will be swamped with competition because they
must give the method away with the sale of the candle. Besides, the
originator is entitled to sell candles WITHOUT the method (can also
release them under DIFFERENT agreements ... only the originator is allowed
to do this BTW)
> You've done a damnfool thing by trying to play dog-in-the-manger. You
> could have rented candles out of one side of your business while selling
> them out of the other, ramping down the rental business while establishing
> yourself as king of the high-volume, low-cost commodity candle market.
Right, you can either rent the use of candles or go into the commodity
candlemaking business. You can not make any money in the high-volume
candle business as the price of candles approaches 0 and everyone is
making them at home. The only way to make any money is to sell the USE of
the candle and keep the making of them to yourself.
In this case, the GPL can be quite effective in PREVENTING the release
of the method of making candles.
In other words, there is no money to be made in selling Apache as much as
there is selling the use of a webserver running Apache. I can add my own
patches to it to improve the performace to much faster than anyone elses
Apache and as long as I never provide a third party those patches, I can
sell the use of my blazing webserver and keep my patches secret. If
GeoCities likes my blazing server and I give them the patches under GPL
for $250,000 they can make more money and have an edge on the competition
until they try to go into the web server software business (compete with
me) then they must divulge the secret of their success and loose their
advantage. They must cut off their nose to spite their face.
Maybe you just don't get it or are arguing just for argument's sake.
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