LimeWire: Open source brings commercial success (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

NewsForge looks at the business behind LimeWire, an open source Gnutella client. "On the development side, LimeWire LLC engages open source developers by paying bounties for features. Small bounties, listed as being 'good for beginners,' pay $50; medium bounties, 'good for learning the intricacies of the code,' pay $200; and large bounties, for projects that are 'difficult, but very useful,' pay $500."

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LimeWire: Open source brings commercial success (NewsForge)

Posted Jul 11, 2005 21:39 UTC (Mon) by rm6990 (guest, #30921) [Link] (4 responses)

I introduced a friend to Limewire a few months ago and she has been using it ever since. About a week ago, she used Limewire Basic to download Limewire Pro.

I browsed through the folder after she told me she had done this (to see if there was any malware or anything in it since she did download the program from P2P) and it had a COPYING file. I read it and Pro is released under the GPL, like the basic version.

If you are allowed to redistribute it, how exactly do they expect to make money??? Doesn't make sense to me.

LimeWire Pro under GPL

Posted Jul 11, 2005 23:48 UTC (Mon) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link] (1 responses)

You might want to confirm that. It's not inconcievable that the COPYING file was unintentionally packaged with both "Basic" and "Pro". An easy test: Exercise your rights under the GPL to ask the vendor for the source code to LimeWire Pro, and see how they respond.

If you *do* get the source from them, then there's any number of ways they can still make money. Most of them involve actually giving value each time the money is paid (as opposed to collecting rent for pushing bits around, as proprietary software models do).

If you get nowhere, then they're misleadingly distributing LimeWire Pro under the GPL; call them on it.

LimeWire Pro under GPL

Posted Jul 12, 2005 11:58 UTC (Tue) by nedrichards (guest, #23295) [Link]

I believe it is distributed under the GPL, since all the code is in the CVS etc. and other clients that use Limewire as a base (like Acquisition on OS X) have the pro features. Frankly a lot of the value is in providing compiled binaries, especially for platforms where people are unused to that sort of thing (like Windows) and of course support, which you're only going to get if you bought the thing from them.