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Well, not
Well, not
Posted May 10, 2008 21:02 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)In reply to: Well, not by renox
Parent article: Interview with Neil Young on Music Piracy, MP3 Hell and Finding Freaks on the Web (ReadWriteWeb)
Could you please give an example of such a case? Source code available != free software (FSF's "free software", or OSI's "Open Source", just to avoid silly semantic arguments)
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Well, not
Posted May 10, 2008 22:49 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The `we sell you the binary and support, or the software and you get to maintain it' is one of two approaches often used when the supplier is a small software house selling proprietary software to enormous behemoths. (The other approach is `we sell you the binary and escrow the code: if we go under, you get the code and poach our developers'.) This sort of situation inverts the power relationships typical in the consumer software industry, where the software company is the behemoth and the users are trying to get some freedoms. In this case, the *users* are the behemoths and are trying to make sure that the supplier wouldn't put them over a barrel.