RMS: The GNU GPL Is Here to Stay (O'ReillyNet) [LWN.net]

RMS: The GNU GPL Is Here to Stay (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 24, 2005 22:43 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: RMS: The GNU GPL Is Here to Stay (O'ReillyNet) by mikec
Parent article: RMS: The GNU GPL Is Here to Stay (O'ReillyNet)

As far as I know nobody said anything about weither or not it's moral to charge people for using software/service.

Money isn't a issue and GPL/RMS/FSF fully supports people making money and charging money for software as far as I can tell.

The trouble is that many people feel that the only possible way to make money from software successfull is that they must hide the source code from people and use patent law and other punitive measures to create artificial demand for software by restricting what you can and cannot do with said software.

RMS on the other hand feels (as I understand it) that restricting access to the source code of software your using is immoral. (again as I understand his stance) Money and charging money or being a commercial success or popular is very secondary to the moral implications of Free software in RMS's eyes..

It's perfectly moral to charge money for software or programming services as long as you make the source code aviable to your end users, as RMS sees it.

One example of a project that does this is the developers of Lustre clustering file system. http://www.lustre.org/

They work to create very high speed and high aviability file systems and in turn their work is used by many in the high performance computing feild. When you buy the software from them they give you the source code with it, under the GPL license even. (I believe.) They make aviable a slightly older version of their system publicly aviable to download if you'd like to use it without paying for it.

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RMS: The GNU GPL Is Here to Stay (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 24, 2005 23:28 UTC (Sat) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

If it's under the GPL, those who paid for it have the right to redistribute the source, but might have neither requirement nor motivation to do so. Cygnus Support, later Cygnus Solutions, now Red Hat, and lately CodeSourcery, have sometimes profited by relying on this fact. This is particularly likely if the only others who might benefit from redistributing it are competitors; or if others who could use it can afford to pay and really ought to share the burden of maintenance.

More frequently, nobody else is interested in the heavily customized version, perhaps because it only works on a proprietary kernel or a proprietary link format. Thus, the source is available but the competitors are obliged to pay again anyway, to get the customizations they need instead. Each of the infinitely varied MIPS implementations, for example, needs its own compiler customizations. It would be as much work to customize one of them again as to start with the FSF version.

There's nothing shady about any of this.

RMS: The GNU GPL Is Here to Stay (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 25, 2005 10:25 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Previous versions of Lustre file system I've looked at are in the form of just normal everyday kernel patches. Your free to download them yourself if you want to look at the code.. just register with their website and they'll email you a ftp link to the source code.

It's mearly a example of how a company can make money selling GPL'd software. Lustre does fairly well and the developers learned how to make it work by lessons taken from previous attempts at creating a high speed, high aviability clustering file system. (called intermezzo and before that coda (and before that example from afs/openafs))

Also as a bonus to this developement Lustre developers have had to do a lot of work improving and adapting it's changes to existing file systems. The major filesystem they worked on that could be used along with their clustering file system is ext3. They've put substantial developement time and work into ext3 which was then worked on by Redhat to get the it into the kernel proper. It is one of the major reasons why ext3 is as nice as it is now.