|
|
|
|
|
|
by jkyle
3938 days ago
|
|
|
> that leaves the possibility for free software growing so big as to hinder progress How would that happen, exactly? Particularly with the GPL. If an author (company or otherwise) distributes their work, they're required to also provide the source for that work. Thus, no author distributes their GPL'd software with an expectation that they will make a profit by keeping others from using that code. So whether the main project continues to use their code or replaces it with other code of comparable functionality is irrelevant. In fact, most entities who buy into Linux do so (in part) to offload the maintenance expenses associated with that code base. So if the community picks it up, win. If the community does not, you 'break even' as you're in the same position of maintaining the code base internally as you would would have been if you'd not open sourced it in the first place. |
|
|
How that could happen is: Imagine in a world in which a free, open-source operating system is immensely popular, installed on most desktops, devices, servers and embedded systems. Suppose the system's distro ships bundled with some applications (also perfectly open-sourced).
If it is difficult to compete with those applications, how does it matter that they are open source?
Sure, you can make a fork of the distro which is unbundled, making it easier to replace appliactions. But, oops, hardware vendors don't want to ship the forked distro for whatever reasons. They say, "we install the image that 99% of the world uses. We don't charge anything extra; if you want something else, wipe the HD/flash and do a complete reinstall."
In this hypothetical world, would governments step in with anti-trust litigation? (Against what?)
For extra confusion points, let's add signing: suppose you can't even add an application to the distro if it doesn't have an approved signature from the upstream. (Isn't that essesentially Firefox started with add-ons?)