Crazy software development business model

[Thomas Mondoshawan Tate]

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On Tue, Oct 23, 2001 at 04:22:39PM -0700, Kevin Buettner wrote:
>
> You can still do the same thing with the GPL so long as you are the
> copyright holder.  You can release a piece of software under the GPL
> and reap all of the usual benefits from doing so.  But you, the
> copyright holder, may also license this software to others (for
> commercial gain, etc.) under some other license which doesn't have
> the same restrictions as the GPL.  (I.e, the licensee won't be forced
> to redistribute his propriety changes.)

Aahh... But there is a slight problem -- wouldn't the viral effect of the
GPL come into play here and prevent me from doing so? (referring to the
clause that states all derivations of the product under the GPL must be
under the GPL)

> There are several problems with "personal use only" licenses:
>=20
>     1) It is sometimes difficult to differentiate between personal
>        and commercial use.

How so? I would figure that having a direct clause like, "if you use this
software for monetary gain" would be discriminatory enough to do this job.
Where else would you sell the product for "monetary gain" except in a
commercial enterprise?

>     2) External contributors may choose to put their efforts elsewhere
>        given the nature of the license.  I.e, while it's true that the
>        source code is available, the modified code isn't truly useful
>        in all settings which may make it less appealing to work with.

Ahh... Non portability of code to another application is a slight issue, but
that wasn't the kind of development I was thinking of. Ex: Quake came out
for DOS. It wasn't until id released the source that it took off for us
"alternative operating system" guys. In the process, id neglected an entire=
ly
untapped marketshare. This is not unforseen, as the company was fairly small
and didn't have the massive army of coders required to keep multiple ports
of the game maintained, etc. Quite frankly, I'm surprised they managed to do
so well with the game, even though they had to port it from NeXTStep's
Objective C to raw C (could be wrong here -- had a chance to ogle at the
source a while back, and I can't clearly remember which language it was in
in it's final form).

The idea with the open-source engine is the ability to leverage the
developers out there that are interested in porting the game to their
platform, and allow us to reach that marketshare that id and virtually every
other game/applications developer has neglected because of development
costs. Since we'd be selling the datafiles primarily, we still make
money, and we tap that untapped marketshare all in the same strike.

>     3) You are likely to incur the wrath of the open source / free softwa=
re
>        communities if your license is not open/free enough.

Hrm... From what I understood as the mission of the open source/free
software movement was not to make the software "free" as in beer, but "free"
as in distributable and hackable. As such, if the engine were to be licensed
under such a license, wouldn't this follow the same principal?

The idea of commercializing the open-source engine to other commercial
developers was something I tacked on to the original idea at the last minute
-- the original e-mail was written up just before I headed out to class, so
it was a bit of a jumble. =3Dop

--
Thomas "Mondoshawan" Tate
phoenix@psy.ed.asu.edu
http://tank.dyndns.org

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