Stefan Monnier
I can't entirely dismiss GNU/FSF/GPL but it poses a fundamental conflict with the only way I can see of earning a living so it's like a continuous background problem which drains some of my energy and enthusiasm hence the length of my rambling post where I made another attempt to understand my relation to it.
Maybe you should thank the FSF for making you doubt: you should really think very hard about how you're going to make a living off of selling a program, even if that program hasn't been anywhere near any GPL'd code. In all likelihood it'll be much easier to earn your money by selling services around your program than just the program itself.
To add to that from the point of view of a potential user: if there some programme that I'm going to rely on and its source is not free, I'll look elsewhere rather than rely on a single vendor that might disappear without a trace and leave me with no support. Conversely, if it has free source, but doesn't quite do what I'm relying on it to do, I'll happily pay someone to sort it out for me (assuming that I can't/don't want to/am to busy to do it myself and that I have any money). I know of several good ideas that started out as attempts at commercial projects but weren't taken up. The best that happened to them is that someone recoded the idea (or it was re-released) as free software. If that didn't happen, they disappeared without trace. Remember, keeping the code secret is no protection against someone rewriting the whole thing from scratch. If it's a big enough idea, you can be sure that some large commercial concern (and conceivably teams of amateurs) will do that unless you've patented something crucial... and keeping patents alive is an expensive business -- especially if there's a large concern on your case ("we want to use your patented idea. Oh, it looks like your code uses one of our patented ideas; you'll be hearing from our lawyers"). -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk http://www.chaos.org.uk/~jf/Stuff-I-dont-want.html (updated 2006-07-14)