wxPython Licence vs GPL

[Mike Meyer]

Re: wxPython Licence vs GPL

Steven D'Aprano <steve@REMOVETH IScyber.com.au> writes:[color=blue]
> On Sat, 26 Nov 2005 18:18:44 -0500, Mike Meyer wrote:[color=green]
>> So that's the basis of the disagreement. I'm using "restrictio n" with
>> the intent of communicating it's normal english meaning,[/color]
> Your meaning is about as far from the plain English sense of "restrictiv e"[/color]

restiction != restrictive.

<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.or g> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.

[Steven D'Aprano]

Re: wxPython Licence vs GPL

On Sat, 26 Nov 2005 09:54:24 -0800, Alex Martelli wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>> My understanding is that both Oracle and SAP make most of their money
>> through consulting and customization rather than licencing or sales. I[/color]
>
> Have you checked their quarterly statements recently?[/color]

Obviously not.

Thanks for going beyond the call of duty to research the facts in such
detail. I'm surprised that Adobe is selling so many licences -- I don't
know anyone who has paid for Adobe software in many years -- and you can
take that any way you like. (Kids! Pirating software is stealing!!!)

I can't argue with anything you've written, except to say that we've
obviously got different ideas of what consists of software sales.

I know that there is a general sense of "sales" that effectively means
"any source of income from services or goods". There is also a more
restrictive (there's that word again...) sense of a sale being a transfer
of ownership. In that stricter sense, nobody sells software -- they
merely licence it.

The sense of "software sales" I mean is intermediate between the two. The
way I mean "sales", when Joe Public goes to acmesoft.com, pays $99 on his
credit card number to download Acmesoft FooMaker, that's a sale. When he
discovers that he also needs 37 Client Access Licences at $19 each, that's
_not_ a software sale, and neither is the $150 per year for support and
upgrades: that's revenue from licencing, not sales.

You're usage of sales may differ, and I'm not going to argue that one is
better than the other. By my meaning, Red Hat doesn't sell RH Enterprise
Linux, but charges for support. By your meaning, Red Hat does sell RHEL.
I'm good with that definition too, so long as we can agree on one or the
other.


--
Steven.

[Rikard Bosnjakovic]

Re: wxPython Licence vs GPL

Steven D'Aprano wrote:
[color=blue]
> (Kids! Pirating software is stealing!!!)[/color]

Or evaluating, depending of how you look at it.


--
Sincerely, | http://bos.hack.org/cv/
Rikard Bosnjakovic | Code chef - will cook for food
------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Steven D'Aprano]

Re: wxPython Licence vs GPL

On Sat, 26 Nov 2005 21:39:13 +0100, Martin P. Hellwig wrote:
[color=blue]
> The software was sold in 3 separates modules requiring a yearly renewal,[/color]

The software is hardly sold if you have to renew that "sale" every year.
That's more like a lease. I'd call it revenue from licencing, not revenue
from sales.

Of course you're welcome to describe it as sales. It is an arbitrary
choice one way or another -- the main thing is to not talk at
cross-purposes, as we obviously have been doing.

--
Steven.

[Martin P. Hellwig]

Re: wxPython Licence vs GPL

Steven D'Aprano wrote:[color=blue]
> On Sat, 26 Nov 2005 21:39:13 +0100, Martin P. Hellwig wrote:
>[color=green]
>> The software was sold in 3 separates modules requiring a yearly renewal,[/color]
>
> The software is hardly sold if you have to renew that "sale" every year.
> That's more like a lease. I'd call it revenue from licencing, not revenue
> from sales.
>
> Of course you're welcome to describe it as sales. It is an arbitrary
> choice one way or another -- the main thing is to not talk at
> cross-purposes, as we obviously have been doing.
>[/color]
I agree

--
mph

[Paul Boddie]

Re: wxPython Licence vs GPL

Fredrik Lundh wrote:[color=blue]
> Steven D'Aprano wrote:[color=green]
> > Fine. If you want to take rights away from the people you redistribute
> > somebody else's software to, then the GPL is not for you.[/color]
>
> the people you distribute somebody else's open source software to
> still have the same rights to that software as you have. GPL or not
> GPL doesn't change that a bit.[/color]

It's true that the original software would still be available under the
original licence and that commercial, closed source usage of that
software doesn't actually affect its availability. Moreover, many (if
not most) copyright regimes demand that you acknowledge the different
copyrights on the entire work, regardless of how permissive the
licences on the different portions of that work are. It's certainly
true that an end-user of a closed source repackaging of the original
software could discover where the software originated and be aware of
their rights to that software under less restrictive terms, but I
suppose that part of the idea behind licences like the LGPL (which is
more relevant to this particular point) and the GPL is to eliminate the
detective work needed to discover what is in the binary black box and
to make clear the end-user's rights to portions of that work "up
front": both requiring the distribution of, or the offer to distribute,
the source code.
[color=blue]
> I find it a lot more annoying when people grab my stuff, make trivial
> additions or bugfixes to it, and GPL the result instead of contributing
> it back.[/color]

This presumably goes to the heart of the recent Zope vs. Plone
licensing discussion as well, although with less emphasis on the
trivial nature of the work. As I noted there, one could make one's
licences GPL-incompatible if such behaviour appears offensive, but that
would probably be counterproducti ve in several respects.

Paul

[Alex Martelli]

Re: wxPython Licence vs GPL

Steven D'Aprano <steve@REMOVETH IScyber.com.au> wrote:
...[color=blue]
> Thanks for going beyond the call of duty to research the facts in such[/color]

You're welcome! Like most amateur investors, I kid myself that research
makes my stock picks better (considering the tiny amounts one actually
invests, I doubt that any dollar difference divided by the time needed
to do research actually reaches to minimum hourly wage, so, it's more in
the nature of an excuse, I guess;-).
[color=blue]
> detail. I'm surprised that Adobe is selling so many licences -- I don't
> know anyone who has paid for Adobe software in many years -- and you can
> take that any way you like. (Kids! Pirating software is stealing!!!)[/color]

For reasons that escape me, I appear to observe a much lower inclination
to piracy in the Mac world -- which may help explain why Adobe makes
over 1/4 of their sales there, according to one of their tables, even
though they get strong competition from Apple itself. E.g: surely
professional Acrobat must sell less when the OS itself ensures any app
can "print" to PDF, as MacOS X does; in the video field, of which I know
nothing first-hand, I'm told Apple's Final Cut, express and pro, vastly
outsells Adobe's comparable offerings; etc. I guess these effects, and
the fact that Macs are less than 10% of laptops and desktops, are
overcompensated by a combination of Mac users' higher propensity to
purchase rather than pirate, and the higher prevalence of "creative
professionals" in the Mac crowd.

[color=blue]
> "any source of income from services or goods". There is also a more
> restrictive (there's that word again...) sense of a sale being a transfer
> of ownership. In that stricter sense, nobody sells software -- they
> merely licence it.[/color]

This "legalistic " take has generally little to do with the *accounting*
interpretation of "selling" -- and since you were asking specifically
about *profits*, accounting is really the only way to answer.

But, if "transfer of ownership" is what you mean, you're STILL totally
wrong in doubting that there is a lot of profit being made today by
selling software -- transfering ownership of software. What do you
think the IT giants of India MOSTLY make profits on? While they're
relentlessly trying to branch out to other sources, such as consulting
and all kinds of services, and starting to show interesting results in
these expansion efforts, still today MOST of their profits come from
writing software for some customer firm and transferring ownership of
the software in question -- i.e., SELLING software by this strict legal
definition.

In terms of accounting (GAAP) this might in fact be better framed as a
service -- "writing software on your behalf" rather than "transferri ng
to you the ownership of this software written to your specifications" ;
and the operating margins, now that the market for top professionals in
Bangalore &c has heated up so much, are aligned with "resellers of
services", lower than those of "sellers of software" in the normal
accounting interpretation.

But you can't have it both ways -- if you mean "selling" in the normal
accounting sense, you're wrong as I showed in the last post; if you mean
in the legalistic sense, you're wrong as I'm showing here. For each
dollar of profit anybody makes, you can no doubt deny it comes from
selling software in SOME sense of "selling", since the legalistic
meaning conflicts with the accounting one -- but fix any ONE meaning,
and you're still wrong. Including the strangely mixed one here...:
[color=blue]
> The sense of "software sales" I mean is intermediate between the two. The
> way I mean "sales", when Joe Public goes to acmesoft.com, pays $99 on his
> credit card number to download Acmesoft FooMaker, that's a sale. When he[/color]

OK, then among companies which make profits selling software are
BestBuy, CompUSA and so on -- you're welcome to drill down into their
detailed financial reports yourself, but just consider the amounts of
precious shelf space that they devote to shrink-wrapped boxes of games,
anti-virus thingies, and the like... do you think those retailers don't
have any sense of which side their bread is buttered on?-) As a very
rough 0th-order approximation, you can take it that those chains'
*profits* come in very roughly equal parts from sales of hardware,
software, and services (mostly extended warranties on the HW they sell,
but also out of warranties repairs, etc etc) -- the sales volumes are
WAY higher for HW, lower for SW and lowest for services, but the margins
go the other way 'round, by far.

This sense of "selling software" of course has nothing to do with
licenses: some of the software these retailers "sell" is covered by
various commercial licenses, some by GPL or other open source licenses,
and some is even in the public domain. So you could say they're in fact
selling pretty colored boxes with shrink-wrap, containing a booklet and
a CD (and the ownership of these physical components is indeed
transferred, so the legalistic meaning of "sale" is fully satisfied
too;-). Sometimes there's a license agreement being executed (if
"shrink-wrap licenses" have any legal standing -- I'm not sure that
jurisprudence in the matter is settled yet), sometimes not, but that
makes no real difference to either the retailer's business model or the
purchaser's perceptions. Purchasers today are reasonably aware that
they might probably download the same programs, in many cases, either
for free or at a substantial discount, but they're buying the
convenience of loading them from CD (and in the case of, e.g., anti
virus defences and personal firewalls, may feel they need that because
connecting to the net for the download without such protection may be
deadly -- whether the feeling is 100% accurate or not, is neither here
nor there). Or maybe they like the colorful box and booklet. But while
discussing while a sale is or isn't made through this or that channel is
important, it doesn't affect the fact that a sale IS made and brings
operating income (thus profits, if the margins are good).

Lastly, I don't think your distinction makes much sense. You say it
counts as a sale for you if JP pays $99 for the download. But what is
the difference if the download is free but the program just downloaded
is a hobbled "demo" version? If you want to really USE it, you buy a
license which comes with a code to unlock full functionality -- and it
so happens the license costs $99. Why do you think it is a crucial
distinction as to whether the $99 are forked over to enable the download
itself, or just AFTER the download to make the just-downloaded bits
useful? Looks like an irrelevant detail to me if I ever saw one...


Alex

[Paul Rubin]

Re: wxPython Licence vs GPL

Steven D'Aprano <steve@REMOVETH IScyber.com.au> writes:[color=blue]
> If you want me to agree that the GPL puts more conditions on distribution
> than the MIT/BSD licence, then I'll happily agree. If you want me to
> describe that as a "restrictiv e licence", then I refuse.[/color]

With the GPL, you get a slight restriction from the GPL author (you're
not allowed to redistribute the binary unless you offer source). With
the MIT/BSD license you get far worse restrictions, from potentially
far more different people, from the downstream freeloaders who don't
want you to redistribute even the binary.

[Paul Rubin]

Re: wxPython Licence vs GPL

Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.i nvalid> writes:[color=blue]
> With the GPL, you get a slight restriction from the GPL author (you're
> not allowed to redistribute the binary unless you offer source).[/color]

Forgot to add: and under the GPL, you must not threaten to have the
goverment clobber people for redistributing the source or binary after
they have have gotten it from you. It's one of those "forbidding
forbidden" types of restrictions.

[Paul Rubin]

Re: wxPython Licence vs GPL

Steven D'Aprano <steve@REMOVETH IScyber.com.au> writes:[color=blue][color=green]
> > if I owned a company making profit on software sales (sale =!
> > support) you sign a death wish for using GPL[/color]
>
> Apart from Microsoft, and possibly Quark (makers of Quark Express desktop
> packaging software), and perhaps a few console game developers, is there
> any company making a profit on software sales?[/color]

Yes, sheesh, quite a few (Adobe, Oracle, almost everyone shipping
gadgets that basically wrap embedded code, etc). Anyone writing free
software on their own resources and releasing it under (say) the BSD
license is basically working for those companies for nothing.