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Movable Type released under the GPL

Movable Type released under the GPL

Posted Dec 13, 2007 21:57 UTC (Thu) by and (subscriber, #2883)
In reply to: Movable Type released under the GPL by allesfresser
Parent article: Movable Type released under the GPL

> You mean, like Trolltech, or Sun, for example?

I guess more like 4Front's OSS, as well as SSH, PGP and (arguably) Solaris.

These all share one characteristic: As long as they provided any value over the free software
equivalents were proprietary and when they were freed it was already they where hardly
relevant anymore...

Of course there are other projects which evited this fate: Qt and Java are probably most
prominent. For Qt and Java there where projects under heavy development which had the
potential to make the originals irrelevant, both called harmony.


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Movable Type released under the GPL

Posted Dec 14, 2007 0:55 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

I wouldn't write off Solaris yet. IMNSHO, 4Front OSS failed as a commercial product not because the code was GPL'd, but because their business model was to sell more advanced versions as proprietary code. That gave people more incentive to use ALSA.

Movable Type released under the GPL

Posted Dec 20, 2007 19:01 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

Which arguably spoiled things for everybody. :(

Movable Type released under the GPL

Posted Dec 20, 2007 19:29 UTC (Thu) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

I don't think it "spoiled things" for anyone, except perhaps the owners of OSS. End users got ALSA, which is substantially better than OSS.

There are certainly opportunities to sell GPL'd code. Red Hat is an obvious example. But it's also possible to sell commercial non-GPL licenses to GPL code, if you're the owner of the code. I've done that myself.

What I don't think tends to work very well is the bait-and-switch "You can use this version under the GPL, or pay us for a better version" model. If that's tried for anything that's even vaguely popular, it just inspires people to fork the code and add the features themselves.

While many people seem not to like the idea of forking development, that's actually one of the great advantages of free software. You're not locked in to getting updates from a single source.

Movable Type released under the GPL

Posted Dec 21, 2007 19:51 UTC (Fri) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

> End users got ALSA, which is substantially better than OSS.

That's what I was referring to; I must respectfully disagree about the relative merits of the
two systems.

Movable Type released under the GPL

Posted Dec 14, 2007 14:13 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Last I checked, SSH was alive and well; they went the opposite route: ssh was open source for Unix, and is now closed source. What is open source is OpenSSH, an ofshot off the last open-source SSH by the OpenBSD crowd.

AFAIU, PGP was always intended as open source, just in the software-patent blessed US it had to be commercial.

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