> I have licensed a lot of custom-built software under the
> GPL (because I used GPL'ed bits and pieces). None of my
> clients ever redistributed their software, most likely
> because they considered it a competitive advantage
This makes sense if you're selling some niche code to businesses, but things like the Sveasoft Linksys firmware drama indicate that selling direct to users, especially technical users who understand and maybe already use the GPL, is a whole different world.
Yes, but Linksys is selling routers, not software. And basing their firmware on GPL'ed code presumably reduces cost and time to market. The same applies to Sveasoft.
Some people think they can have their cake and eat it too.
The price of using GPL is setting your users free.
Shabble was talking about Sveasoft: a company that made their own firmware based on Linksys', but got stroppy when other people starting to distribute their 'fork'.
Ah, I thought it was reasonably common knowledge, so I didn't elaborate on it.
Essentially, Sveasoft (which is/was, iirc, a single guy) took the original Linksys firmware releases, and built some fairly impressive new features on top. His business plan involved selling subscriptions to receive updates on a regular basis, with the sources being made public (beyond the subscribers) after some embargo period.
What actually happened was that very few people subscribed, and immediately began posting the latest sources publicly (as permitted under the GPL), which resulted in Sveasoft threatening them with legal action, issuing C&Ds to anyone involved, and inserting more and more complicated tracking tokens and other booby-traps in the code.
I'm not sure if (how?) it's ended, but there is still activity on at least one of the anti-sveasoft sites: http://sveasoft.blogspot.com/
I suspect it's mostly died down because there are now much more viable alternatives (DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato, etc) than there were at the time, and nobody wants the hassle of dealing with it.
It does raise the issue (as mentioned in the licence article this thread is about) of dealing with the GPL on embedded devices, where most of the work is in kernel modules or statically linked binaries. The usual techniques which allow proprietary software to be segregated and interface with GPL code aren't really appropriate, and it's quite difficult to build such a thing.
Whether this is a good thing or not depends on your perspective, of course.
"What actually happened was that very few people subscribed, and immediately began posting the latest sources publicly (as permitted under the GPL), which resulted in Sveasoft threatening them with legal action, issuing C&Ds to anyone involved, and inserting more and more complicated tracking tokens and other booby-traps in the code."
Exactly point point. This is why you can't run a viable business selling GNU software.
No. That's why, if you want to sell software to your users without giving them the freedoms afforded by the GPL, you'll have to either write your own software from scratch or base it on one that uses a license that allows you to give your users an inferior set of rights.
This makes sense if you're selling some niche code to businesses, but things like the Sveasoft Linksys firmware drama indicate that selling direct to users, especially technical users who understand and maybe already use the GPL, is a whole different world.