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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: licence doubt! [Fwd: Announce: KDE Studio Gold]
From:       Shawn Gordon <shawn () thekompany ! com>
Date:       2001-01-24 6:08:01
[Download RAW message or body]

At 10:38 PM 1/23/2001, you wrote:
>Tuesday 23 January 2001 10:50, Alessandro Praduroux ΞΑΠΙΣΑΜ:
>|   On Tuesday 23 January 2001 09:05, glaurent@telegraph-road.org wrote:
>|   > > Since KDEStudio (the latest guest-CVS version from thekompany.com) is
>|   > > widely using GPL code of KDevelop, I doubt if they could ever release
>|   > > such a commercial version.
>|   >
>|   > Who said the commercial version wasn't under GPL ?
>|
>|   actually KDEStudio Gold will be provided with full source code under the
>| GPL.
>|
>|   see http://www.thekompany.com/products/ksg/faq.php3
>|
>|   bye
>
>Then it will be interesting to see how theKompany.com will sell it.
>I just wonder: if there is a company with 10 work places, and there are 10
>programmers sitting on their desks - how you [theKompany] will sell them 10
>copies?
>
>Or you are going to sell "one copy per site"?  :-)
>
>P.S. Still I wonder why people should buy if sources are available.
>Of course, pricing for US is pretty cheap, so I do not see any problem if you
>put it in WalMart or BestBuy. Question is wether WalMart will agree to take
>it!  :-)
>--

The argument can be made that what you are buying is the packaging, the 
integrated help files and the user manuals, which are not free and are not 
open source.  There is nothing restricting a company from buying one copy 
for 1,000 people, just as with RedHat.  However, if they want more than one 
copy of the documentation, they will have to buy it from us.

If I talk about close sourcing something everyone gets up in arms about it, 
if I leave it open source everyone assumes that it will be pirated and make 
no money.  So as a company, what do you all think I should do?  While 
writing code can be difficult (I've done it for over 20 years), creating 
packaging, documentation, finding distribution channels, managing sales and 
shipping is a big pain and beyond what most programmers are interesting in 
doing.  How many of you buy distributions that have software you could 
download, compile and install yourself?  I imagine most of you, simply for 
the convenience.

Our software is in Fry's, Microcenter and Barnes and Noble now (to name a 
few).  Nothing stopping us from getting into more stores with more software.

There's my final ramble for the day before going to bed :)

>Vadim Plessky
>http://kde2.newmail.ru  (English)
>http://kde2.newmail.ru/index_rus.html  (Russian)
>Do you have Arial font installed? Just test it!
>http://kde2.newmail.ru/font_test_arial.html
>
>
> >> Visit http://master.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-devel#unsub to 
> unsubscribe <<


Regards,

Shawn Gordon
President
theKompany.com
www.thekompany.com
949-713-3276



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