Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: GNU Business Network Definition

[Chris Croughton]

On Sat, Jun 10, 2006 at 11:34:10AM +0100, Dave wrote:

> On 09/06/06, Chris Croughton <address@hidden> wrote:
> >On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 08:40:01PM +0100, Dave wrote:
> >
> >> On 09/06/06, Shane M. Coughlan <address@hidden> wrote:
> >>
> >> > Exclusivity of use and support should perhaps be secondary.
> >>
> >> I basically agree, but instead of it being secondary it should be of
> >> primary status, with non-exclusive members allowed but given overtly
> >> secondary status.
> >
> >I disagree, making it a secondary status will still put off businesses
> >who may have most of their work in Free Software but have obligations to
> >support old proprietary software or for that matter may be transitioning
> >to Free Software
> 
> Or it might persuade the former to finally upgrade those clients away
> from old software, and persuade the latter to complete their
> transition.

Why would it?  They want their freedom (remember that word, freedom?) to
use the best software available for their clients.  In many cases that
means 'legacy' software, because no one is willing to pay (and wait) for
the software to be redeveloped to the same standard using FOSS.  And
their transitions are often waiting on the same thing, applicastions
which have the same functionality (not some super new incompatible
functionality) as the old.

To rewrite old applications is not trivial.  To test them to the same
standard and prove that they are no more buggy than the old apps takes a
long time.  Retraining people to use new apps (and porting old
databases) similarly takes a long time and costs a lot.  Someone would
have to pay for it, and most developers of FOSS apps are doing it, well,
for free.  I've seen a company transitioning from an old system with a
proprietary database to a new Java MySQL one, and it wasn't pretty, and
even several months later they were still having to go back to the old
one because the new one hadn't had time to be tested under full load
before being deployed (running them both in parallel was totally
impractical, it would have doubled the time to get anything done).

I have examples.  Few people who do music production use FOSS to do it,
because the FOSS apps just aren't up to it.  This includes many who use
FOSS for everything else, develop FOSS, etc., but they maintain Windows
or Mac (or RiscOS) systems to run the applications they need.  At
current rates it will probably be a decade or more before the FOSS apps
have even caught up with where things like Sibelius and Cubase are now,
let alone where their successors will be.  The same for a number of
artists (the GIMP is wonderful, and I know a number of artists who love
it, but it is an Image Manipulation tool not very usable for creating
the images).  The FOSS electronic schematic and PCB design apps aren't
anywhere near as usable as the proprietary ones (I like command line
tools, but there are limits when dealing with an essentially graphical
design process).

I tell you what.  I'll pay the same cost as for that of Sibelius
(http://www.sibelius.com) to a person to develop an equivalent FOSS app.
I won't even insist that it is identical, but I will insist that it has
all of the same functionality (including interfaces which can be used by
keyboard as well as mouse, something most X designers seem to neglect).
I'll give them a year, if they haven't done it by then I'm buying the
proprietary one instead.  To be precise, I'm talking about Sibelius 4
Professional at GBP 600, and I'm not going to expect them to be up to
whatever the version out in a year's time does.

> >Fanaticism shoots itself in the foot,
> >it puts off more people than it encourages (I've seen this with the GPL,
> >with companies putting a blanket ban on any GPL source being used
> >anywhere in case it infects things which they are contractually required
> >to heep secret, where they can quite happily use BSD and other free
> >licenced code because it doesn't insist that their stuff also be made
> >free).
> 
> Those companies are confused: http://www.rosenlaw.com/html/GPL.PDF etc

You can't link GPL libraries with proprietary code, true?  You can't
incorporate GPL code into your own apps without making them GPL, true?
If you incorporate GPL code into your own even by accident you are still
liable, true?  None of this is a problem with BSD (and definately with
the Zlib licence, of which I use a modified form for my own code).

> That GPL is used for at least 70% of Free code suggests it does not
> put off more people than it encourages.

It suggests nothing of the kind, because there is no indication in that
statistic about how much code in total that represents (a lot less than
70%).  There are a lot of people producing proprietary code instead of
free code because they (incorrectly) think that 'free' implis GPL and
their cliens can't use GPL code.  And most people producing FOSS code
seem very unaware of what the GPL does allow and mandate (how many of
them, for instance, still make their source available for 3 year old
projects?), they seem to believe that GPL and Free Software are
interchangeable terms and when some of the clauses are pointed out to
them they hurriedly back down.

And note that I said "Fanaticism ... puts off more people than it
encourages".  Most companies probably can live with the GPL, but the
sort of fanaticism which says "if you don't do everything our way you
are One Of Them and not One Of Us" will put them right off.

Chris C