From: Euan Mee Date: 2002-05-10T00:14:37+09:00 Subject: Re: 'Ultimate' FreeRIDE ? On 9 May 2002, Tobias Reif wrote (more or less): > Lothar Scholz wrote: > > "Rich Kilmer" wrote: > >>>From: Alan Chen [mailto:alan@digikata.com] > >>>Will ArachnoRuby be Open Source? And free? > > > > No the price will be the same as for the other Scripting/Python > > IDEs. Something like > > > > 79$ for Home Edition > > 299$ for the Commercial > > It could be released as Free Software (GPL), and you still could > charge the same amount of $. (AFAICS) I doubt this in practice. The GPL does not expressly forbid selling the software, its true. In fact, it's set up expressly to allowing selling the software. But... and it's a big but... As I understand it, the GPL expressly allows the purchasor to then distribute any amended version of the source software freely. So, given that developers are not short of the ability to turn source code into working binaries, this means that putting development tools under the GPL means that you're unlikely to sell many more than 1 copies... So I've never understood how people are supposed to make a living selling GPL'd development tools. Can anyone enlighten me? On th eother hand, there are numerous examples of companies that provide GPL'd, freeware or open-source software at no cost, intending to make money on ancillary services - support, pre-forming binaries, implementation consultancy and so on. e.g. Mandrake (just gone to a subscription model), SuSe (just gone to get yet more capital), the AOLServer co., the company that bought PGP, etc. These examples all appear to me to demonstrate that the "give aware your core asset and live off of the fringe revenues" business model is very difficult to thrive on. On the third hand, :-) how many sales will ArachnoRuby make if it's covering the same ground as FreeRIDE. (Three answers spring to mind - there's the chance that FreeRIDE will never make it, so there'll be no competition, so it's worthwhile working on arachnoRuby in case. Maybe ArachnoRuby will be so superior to FreeRIDE that people will want to use it in place of FreeRIDE. Perhaps ArachnoRuby will appear on the scene much earlier than FreeRIDE, giving an n month (or n year) window of opportunity for ArachnoRuby sales). Cheers, Euan xlucid@users.sourceforge.net 'I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance, Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance' - Ogden Nash