On Sat, 16 Dec 2000, Conrad wrote:

> Roughly speaking (i.e. leaving out various differentiating qualifications),
> these sorts of things are major reasons why Qt never caught on as the
> successor to Tk, and were a big stimulus (among other things) for developing
> GTK+, reviving wxWindows (and probably for developing FOX too for that
> matter).
> 
> Not sticking with open source GUI extensions creates (in many cases) lots of
> practical (economic, legal, deployment, managerial permission) problems for
> (many) users/developers of <language>/<GUI>.
> 
> I'm all for people making money off of software--indeed, I hope that people
> figure out how to make tons of money off of Ruby software so as to increase
> the incentives for maximum world-wide use, and to draw maximum resources
> into developing "Ruby/CPAN". But (IMHO) the Ruby community would
> (eventually) be (much) better off in the overall average long run by
> encouraging "2-nd order" or "Linux-style" profiteering on products and
> services derived from a common open source core, especially in connection
> with whatever becomes its mainstream, available out-of-the-box GUI(s).
> 

Stirctly speaking, nothing in the GPL precludes making money from software
development.  What it _does_ require is making source code available. Old-style
bastions of proprietary development argue that doing so reduces their
competiveness in the marketplace.  New style businesses (including IBM which
is, in b2b speak, "reinventing itself") are learning this is not necessarily
the case and that open-sourcing leads to more rapid, more bug-free development
(qualified beta testers can provide fixes along with reporting, for example). 
In the current marketplace, speed _is_ king, so open sourcing can be argued as
a competive _advantage_ rather than a potnential downside.

<soapbox>
Now, in a commercial venue, there _could_ be a downside to
"this_$software_$ux_but_does_something_cool.exe" source code because your
competor can come out with "$sucky_parts_fixed_and_now_does_everything_cool.exe
and blow your marketshare away! But, in the general scheme of things, what is
wrong with that, especially when you consider that end users (and _all_ of us
are in some way "end users") ultimately benefit.

Cornering a market with the only application that performs a specific operation
poorly via copyright and patent, rahter than by quality and features, is
IMO socially unconscionable; in many places in other industries it is also
considered fraud by the applicable legal system.

Competition is great because it encourages (some might say forces) good design,
good engineering and good quality control.  Open source fosters this kind of
beneficial competition. 
</soapbox>

Kent Starr
elderburn / mindspring.com