Thread: Confirmed/CAUTION: N900 Ovi Apps require Corporation + $1M USD Corporate General Liability Insurace
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attila77 is offline attila77
2009-11-22 , 12:57
Posts: 3,319 | Thanked: 5,610 times | Joined on Aug 2008 @ Finland
#155
Would you really have a low opinion of someone who spent that much time, personal energy and their own money on a project, to make you some open source software, for which they give you all the freedoms but ask you to not jeopardise their ability to continue if the only reason you have is "because you can"?
It's not a moral problem, which you are trying to make it into. What you're describing is a lack of proper business model. If there IS added value there, through certifications, support, content, etc, great. But that's not the scenario here. We're talking about MyLittleApp v1.0 from the Ovi Store, published by mostly independent developers. If I can republish it to Extras without removing the appeal of the original, there is *no* added value there.

And if you DO open the 'is it moral' can of worms, what happens to contributors ? Are THEY not entitled for some compensation for their hard work ? What happens to the compensation of projects/libraries which our developer built on ? You'll notice a pattern here - and that is a pattern of proprietary software. You're trying to shoehorn an Open Source project into a classic proprietary business model, and I must say I don't know of a single project that pulled that off.

Do you think it's wrong of Red Hat to sell Red Hat Enterprise Linux? Even though they pay the full-time salary of half the Linux kernel developers, a fair chunk of GNOME developers, and everyone knows you can get a free version, compiled from the same source, from CentOS?
Hold it right there. By your standards, it's CentOS who is impolite as they take the bread out of RedHat folks' mouth. It's CentOS who is jeopardizing the community. Is it OK for CentOS to exist just because they can take RedHat stuff ? What you miss here is that the whole point of RedHat is not in the source, they are not AT ALL in the business of selling code. In those terms, CentOS is not a competitor to RedHat any more than a supposed 'impolite' MyLittleAppCloneInExtras would be.

Sounds to me like you have a particular idea about how these things are done, and aren't particularly informed yourself about the various ways FOSS is sold ethically (at least, by some people's standards ethical). Have you ever read the GNU Manifesto, or the FSF's position on selling free software?
I don't claim to be a lawyer, but I have been involved with Open Source for quite some time now, one segment of which are my activities in Maemo (mostly development, but feel free to check). I don't see how any of the documents you listed contradict anything I said.
Last edited by attila77; 2009-11-22 at 13:00.
 

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