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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:       2000-08-27 4:41:45
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    I'm not quite sure i follow. the end result of what i'm proposing would
    be Free drivers. The impact is that finally, companies would see that
    Free drivers are benefitial (in one sense).

I see that's the conclusion of the argument.  The question is, how
strong is the argument?  How much influence would these benefits have
in persuading camera companies to release free drivers?

    > 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.

    even with binary packages, the number of drivers is the same. 10 for
    this version of gPhoto2, 10 for this version... etc.

That is my point exactly--they will have to support a large number of
binary releases whether the driver is free or not.  So a free driver
won't automatically relieve them of this burden.

    >     - Users on different platforms compile their own binaries,
    > Non-wizard camera customers won't consider that "good support" for
    > their cameras company.

    again though, they would not need to worry about this if the driver was
    Free and maintained.

I see your point here: if the driver is included in gPhoto, they will
not have to distribute drivers at all.  That would be a certain amount
of advantage.

(But if supporting gPhoto becomes vital, they might find it essential
to distribute drivers for OLD versions of gPhoto, because they don't
want people to be unable to use their cameras until the new gPhoto
release.  This will get them into the business of distributing drivers
just the same.)

The advantage of not having to distribute drivers won't persuade
companies which *think* (whether rightly or wrongly) that they gain
some great advantage by secrecy.  So the question that ultimately
matters is how we can arrange for a lot of customers not to buy those
companies' cameras.

That is where the GPL has a major advantage.

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