No, the ones that employ more than one or two people and make decent amounts of money sell services related to GPLed software. (In a world where everyone had proper Internet connections, we wouldn't have companies selling GPL software on physical media at all.) This probably isn't profitable in many cases, especially when distributing directly to the consumer rather than building a product for other business.
There is another special case, but it's selling software in spite of the GPL; home routers, set top boxes, etc. Were they to use GPLv3 software, they'd have no way to protect against another company using their (potentially substantial) work on the software, building/copying the hardware design and creating cheap knock-offs within a few weeks of release, making it too costly to continue.
If a group of companies and individuals wanted to come together to build a new router platform where all would contribute back to it, but they could differentiate themselves on edge features, management interfaces, etc, the BSD license is good enough; and probably a better bet than the GPL.
There seems to be a phenomenon on HN of hardcore anti-copyright or pro-piracy posters who reply antagonistically to posts that they appear to have either deliberately misread or not read at all.
The discussion is about the statement: "But he's asking ALL software developers to stop making software for money"
That is blatantly false. Who gives a shit if they are selling software, or selling "support" for software? Either way people are making money with GPL software.
There seems to be a phenomenon on HN of absurd pedants deliberately derailing conversations.
Can you name a company (or a part of a company that is a profit center, or even an indie developer). That makes it's money primarily from selling GPL software?
Software that used to be sold commercially but was subsequently GPL'd , starving artist type programmers scraping by on donations (i.e earning significantly less than the median programmer salary for someone of their skills) or companies that produce GPL software but make money selling either support or software/hardware based around their GPL software (that itself is not GPL) don't count.
Companies that sell software generally have services divisions as well. My company sells software for large amounts of money, and we have a separate division of the company that sells services.
If a company exists to make money, why would you discount one of their profit centers as invalid because of another of their profit centers?
Many software companies don't have service divisions, or have a service division that consists of people answering the phone and providing basic "talk you through the installation" type support.
I assume that the software your company sells for large amounts of money is not GPL , if it is pure GPL I would be very interested to know who they are and how they manage to get people to actually pay for it when they could just download it for free online.
If a company exists to make money, why would you discount one of their profit centers as invalid because of another of their profit centers?
That's not what I'm saying, what I'm saying is that I've never seen a company create GPL software as a profit center in itself and I really can't think of a business plan that would make that feasible.
Sourcefire does almost exactly that. Their software is open source and you can download and install it for free.
They sell licenses and services, and you can pay for quicker updates to firewall rules and the like. As commercial customers, you can have their software engineers onsite tuning things to your environment, etc.
Covalent is a company that sells Apache. Obviously, they didn't manufacture Apache webservers, but, like Xamp or Wamp, they sell value added bundles that include Apache configurations pre-compiled with PHP or Perl or what have you.
Again, they also have a services division, but I don't personally know much about it.
For the record, no, my company does not sell GPL software. It was proffered as an example that non-GPL-based companies rely on both software sales and services, and it doesn't really matter whether or not the software is GPLd. I don't know why you'd hold it against RedHat that their software is freely downloadable when they're still selling more than a few copies of RHEL.
Sourcefire are selling services based around a GPL product.
Not so familiar with Covalent but it appears they have some things available as GPL but if you want all the enterprise features then it isn't GPL.
Redhat is the same really, they also make their money from support. I believe you need to buy RHEL if you want the support from them, although this might have changed now.
I never suggested that GPL cannot be part of a business plan , I was just disagreeing with the statement that there are companies that sell GPL software, in all cases I can find what you are really paying for is something else not the software itself.
My point is more that there are many areas of software that this does not work in , games or most consumer software being an example.
"Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it."
Your correct that a huge amount of software today uses libraries that are distributed under some form of libre licensing although in most cases this is LGPL , BSD or Apache style licenses rather than GPL.
Sure perhaps they run some stuff on a GNU/Linux server but in most cases this could just as easily be a BSD , Solaris or even Windows server.
There are many types of software where GPL is absolutely a barrier , namely just about anything where the software is the end product. For example pretty much any video game or for example Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator. Some products simply don't lend themselves well to selling support , very few people are going to pay $1/min to get help running a program that is simple enough to figure out on their own from reading the manual and that should 99% of the time just install and run especially if it's not something mission critical that requires 6 nines uptime.