Selling Free Software: An Analogy
Fri, 12/08/2011 - 2:07am — HomerPeople often conflate proprietary software with commercial software, believing software can only be sold if it's proprietary, because a proprietary license is the only thing that prevents people from using software without paying.
In fact that is not the case at all. On the one hand, proprietary software is used all the time in violation of its license, as the industry's own figures demonstrate.
So clearly proprietary licensing is no guarantee of payment, therefore the license itself is irrelevant to selling software for profit.
On the other hand, Free Software is sold all the time, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Indeed the GPL permits this, and the author of the GPL, Richard Stallman, actively encourages it.
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Sun, 24/07/2011 - 10:44pm — HomerAndrew Orlowski, looking like The Picture of Dorian Gray
I know, it seems puerile to blog about one's comments being rejected from other blogs or forums, not that this happens to me very often, mind you. After all, their blog/forum, their rules. Right?
But still...
This one is rather poignant, and deserves some attention.
For those of you who read the The Register, you'll no doubt be aware of a long-term contributor called Andrew Orlowski. To describe Orlowski as having somewhat right-wing tendencies would be, frankly, a bit of an understatement. His politics and opinions are highly offensive to anyone with even a modicum of common decency, which may be why, for the entire duration of his 11 year tenure at The Register, he conspicuously remained the only contributor to completely disable comments in his articles.
Until now.