[jiggy2011]

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.

[bmelton]

Why wouldn't they 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?

[jiggy2011]

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.

[bmelton]

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.

[jiggy2011]

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.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

"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."

[bmelton]

You can 'buy' RHEL without buying a services contract.

Sourcefire SELLS the product, flat out. If anything, they're more of a 'freemium' offering where the free product is a GPL product, and the 'premium' is a faster release cycle for patches / upgrades / definitions.

Covalent sells Apache. I've dealt with Covalent products at a number of federal installations, and I've never once seen a Covalent services rep. If their aim is to sell services, they're not doing a good job.

There are a cornucopia of other examples as well, but these are the three most fitting the description you claim doesn't exist. They do in fact exist, and are making money selling GPL software. That they also have services divisions has nothing to do with whether or not they're making money from selling software.

[jiggy2011]

Apache is licensed under the apache license , not GPL.

This is an important distinction as I don't believe they could do what they do under GPL which is provide proprietary stuff on top of the open source core.

Sourcefire is selling the faster access to releases of rulesets etc, the GPL software is simply the carrot.

RHEL contains software that is not GPL and I doubt that they would stay in business without selling support.

The GPL license was designed specifically to stop people developing proprietary software on top of GPL software.

[burgerbrain]

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3500373

"don't count"

Says you.

[jiggy2011]

They don't count because they are not selling software. They are selling something else and the software is essentially a byproduct.

This means that there are categories of software where GPL does not really fit at all, games for example.

[rue]

You're technically correct, burgerbrain made a poor argument.

GPL software is in no way a barrier to earning money. It's, in fact, crucial to most software today, even if indirectly.

[jiggy2011]

Not sure I agree.

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.

[rue]

> 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.

Could be, but isn't [1]. There's a bunch of embedded GPL code in routers and various little bits of all kinds of systems that enable our current lifestyle, too.

I won't argue that for most (though not all) actual software intended to be sold, GPL probably isn't the best of ideas. But that doesn't prevent earning money while using GPL software.

[1] And certainly hasn't. I won't overlook the historical effect GPL'd code has had.