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List:       gphoto-devel
Subject:    [gphoto-devel] Re: gPhoto2 licensing clarification (was Re: Introduction and Comments)
From:       Richard Stallman <rms () santafe ! edu>
Date:       2000-08-25 21:25:09
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The community will give the company a certain amount of help in
developing a free driver, but the impact of this will be somewhat
smaller than you're envisioning.  Some of the burdens apply to free
drivers too; meanwhile, some of the solutions are available for
non-free drivers too.

    Consider if we support 10 platforms, the revisions could easily add up
    to over 100 distinct drivers for the camera manufacturer to maintain.

Nowadays most users want to obtain free software in precompiled form,
with dpkg or rpm.  So the company will feel pressure from their
customers to make these binaries available even if the driver is free
software.  Thus, they will not save as much as you envision.

    - Users on different platforms compile their own binaries,

Non-wizard camera customers won't consider that "good support" for
their cameras company.

							       or we use a
    server farm to compile the different versions.

We certainly can--but server farms can compile non-free drivers too.
I am sure there will be server farms available outside our community
for them to use.

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