Like I said, go ahead and try that with an iPhone application. If the iPhone app is so buggy or complicated so as to require support, no one will buy it. If it's not, I'll make all the money by selling it for half the price you sell it for. In any case, the examples you mention involve companies selling the labors of others. Joe Schmoe who contributed patch #2345235 to fix a critical bug never sees a cent from RedHat. So your examples don't support your case as much as you seem to think. Regards, John A. De Goes N-BRAIN, Inc. The Evolution of Collaboration http://www.n-brain.net | 877-376-2724 x 101 On Mar 24, 2009, at 6:58 AM, Karel Gardas wrote:
John A. De Goes wrote:
Go ahead sell your GPL application. I'll get your code, build the application, and sell it for less than half of what you're selling it for.
How exactly will you make your money, then?
Ask RedHat how they make money from RHEL while Oracle and CentOS are exact copies of it. Ask RedHat/JBoss how they make money from JBoss AS when all the source code is available in their repository.
Probably, it's not only about the software anymore, but also about the service you get with the software subscription... Although I agree that this applies only to software which crossed some kind of complexity already (hence service is needed) and that majority of phone apps might not fall into this category yet especially if they are not tied to some kind of server based services.
Karel