Shawn O. Pearce wrote:
Jakub Narebski <jnareb@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 10/4/07, Benoit SIGOURE <tsuna@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 4, 2007, at 11:12 AM, Jakub Narebski wrote:
Note that Git is GPLv2, and it will probably stay that forever, so you
are _free_ to start a commercial support scheme for Git, but others
are free not to choose it. This question is to get to know if there is
sufficient demand for commercial Git support for it to be viable.
Once again (AFAIR this was already raised during one of the previous
summary) what's the link between GPLv2 and commercial support? You
seem to imply that because Git won't move to GPLv3, it's a good thing
for potential paid support, or something. I don't quite see how
GPLvX comes into play with commercial support. I'm not a license
expert though.
The only link between GPL and commercial support is that GPL does not
prohibit commercial support (like noncommercial-free licenses for example),
and that having commercial support doesn't mean that license would change
to proprietary (it cannot).
Right. There has been some discussion in the past about forming
"The Git Company".
When this survey question was first posed there was some concern that
Git might move to a commerical license of some sort and perhaps not
be GPLvX anymore. That concern is a non-issue; the copyrights for
Git are held by over 300 people, many of whom are kernel hackers and
strong believers in the value of GPLv2. I'm not a kernel hacker,
but I also believe strongly in the value of the GPLv2 license.
You won't see me agreeing to move code I wrote to a non-GPL license
anytime soon. Most (if not all!) of Git's authors feel the same way.
There's several reasons why forming "The Git Company" might help
the overall Git cause, and this question was a feeler to see if
the community was interested in acquiring support through it. Many
other open source projects seem to get some benefit from having a
company loosely affiliated with them, not the least of which are
things like:
- some of the developers can focus more time on the project and
still keep food on the table;
- there are people focused on advertising/marketing the project
and its benfits to potential end-users;
- companies that feel warm-and-fuzzy by having a phone number they
can call for help are more likely to want to use the project
for critical services;
- companies that want training or short-term consulting services
know who they can contact for expertise.
and the list goes on. The problem with said company is it costs
money to keep the lights on and employees fed; money which obviously
cannot be extorted from users through arcane licensing agreements.
Actually it can. I work for precisely such a company (although using
Nagios, cacti and syslog-ng as the base of our products rather than
git). The GPL doesn't state how one is allowed to charge money for
the products, but since larger networks with more users generate more
support calls, we also use a license payment model, where larger
customers pay more and smaller pay less.
The difference between proprietary software is that we have to trust
ur customers to *want* to pay the licenses, as it would be ridiculously
easy for them to replace our versions of the programs with the pristine
oss kind, or even with our patches, as we aren't allowed to keep them
private. However, doing so voids the support-agreement, as we don't take
support for code we haven't audited and tested. In other words, we *must*
provide first-class support and coding aid to our customers, or they
won't want to pay anymore. In practice, it all works out rather well, and
everyone gets something they want.
* I get paid to work with something I like.
* Customers get support, well-tested upgrades and nifty extensions.
* Project maintainers get patches, money, hardware and appreciation.
That last bit is important though. It's not terribly expensive for us to
buy a couple of books or a laptop and send it as a christmas gift to some
project maintainer, but doing so shows appreciation and also buys us the
attention of the developers for when we want our feature-patches accepted ;-)
--
Andreas Ericsson andreas.ericsson@xxxxxx
OP5 AB www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225 Fax: +46 8-230231
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