But it's with actual software development that the desires of some to make a profit run head-on into the philosophies of the free software movement, Richard Stallman, and the GNU project.
The moment you assert ownership of software in such a manner that you, exclusively, are able to charge money for its use, you're going to run afoul of free software advocates, no matter how you try to sugar-coat it. The definition of free software is pretty explicit, and doesn't allow for any restrictions on how programs may be copied, modified, or used. Even software that is free for personal but not commercial use is considered neither free software nor open source. So there's not a lot of room to move.
Having said that, a number of companies have tried some novel approaches to walk this tightrope. They want to earn some revenue from licensing fees without angering too many parts of the Linux community.
One of the more novel ones came from British developer Vita Nuova, whose unique approach to licensing I described last year. You pay once to license the company's Inferno OS, then can redistribute as much as you want of the binaries (and much of the source) without extra fees. While interesting, this approach hasn't made Inferno (now in its third release) visible outside the embedded market.
More interesting is an approach that, in the abstract, makes complete common sense -- at least if you're making software development tools: If someone uses your tool to make free software, they can use your tool for free. If someone uses your tools to make software for resale, they pay you to use the tool. The logic seems clear enough. If someone is going to earn revenue from software created (in part) by your tools, then those tools have monetary value and you, their maker, are entitled to a cut of the revenue.
Currently there are two high-profile practitioners of this approach -- one a well-known name that's new to Linux, the other a low-profile creator of the core of one of Linux's most popular components.
The household name is Borland, which recently announced the Kylix integrated development environment (IDE), closely related to its successful Delphi product. Kylix has debuted to favorable reviews and reports that suggest Kylix will help Linux be accepted in the enterprise by attracting developers used to working in a Visual Basic-type environment.
Borland went out of its way to make no enemies in the open-source community. The Kylix home page sports links to its "partners" at both GNOME and KDE, as well as a "resource" link to Stallman's Free Software Foundation. And when it announced Kylix's coming availability at the recent LinuxWorld, Borland promised that a special Open Edition would be available for free download, providing full Kylix capabilities at no cost to anyone using it to make open-source software. Anyone wanting to use Kylix to make proprietary software would be required to pay $1,000 per development system for the same code.
This clearly won't make everyone happy. Already a project called Lazarus has sprung up to develop a competitive IDE that's 100-percent open source. Still, I think Kylix is a legitimate effort to meet free software developers part way. Though most C developers I know sneer at Kylix/Delphi's Pascal roots, I still see the system appealing to those who like the idea of a high-quality Linux IDE. It will no doubt be shunned by free software purists, but I can see other open-source programmers taking Borland up on its offer.
Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't give proper credit to the company that first developed Kylix's licensing concept -- TrollTech, the Norwegian company whose Qt libraries form the underlying framework of Linux's popular KDE desktop. Qt is available under two licenses. One is the GPL itself, which prohibits anyone using Qt (licensed this way) from using it to write or deploy non-free software. The other license, available from TrollTech, allows non-free software to be developed with Qt.
The original Qt license wasn't anywhere near this flexible. In fact, free software advocates considered it bad enough that they started the GNOME project as an alternative to the Qt-based KDE. Today the two desktops compete on technical and visual merit, instead of the "my license is freer than yours" puffery that marked the desktops' earlier days.
Was it pressure from free software advocates that forced Troll to invent this hybrid approach? Probably. But what's important is that Troll and others such as Borland have developed a model that furthers some of the goals of free software advocates without producing software that's 100 percent free itself.
Do you think the TrollTech/Borland approach to software licensing is workable? Tell Evan the TalkBack below or in the ZDNet Linux Forum. Or write to Evan directly at evan@starnix.com.
