The FSF created the GNU Public License to support their agenda of free software. In particular, the GPL incorporates mechanisms intended to ensure that free software is not incorprated into non-free software.
This has led to a certain industry captain taking the public position that it is not possible to “commercialize” a product incorporating GPL source.
Though IANAL1, I’d like to disagree with the industry captain. There are legal, if underhand, ways to make huge piles of $$$ from GPL software.
Take, for example, boutique retail banks. These are the kind of banks that have just 25 employees and write billion dollar mortgages for family trusts. Suppose you run a company producing front-office software for these banks, and that you have 5% of the market. Your clients pay well if you can offer them a competitive advantage.
You decide to add a Virtual Reality interface to the next version of your product. After carefully evaluating all the options, your technical architect settles on the GPLed C’Nedra as the VR engine, and your company goes into development, incorporating as much of the open source code as is helpful to the project.
Because your new product is derived from GPLed source, you must comply with the terms of the GPL. The trick to remaining profitable is in how you comply. Here is how I would address the license terms:
Section 2a requires that all modified source have a comment noting the change and its date. Your programmers probably do this already with the CVS $Log$ keyword, or similar.
Section 2b disallows charging money for the software. Instead, charge for installation, customisation, support, and ‘consulting.’
Section 2b also requires that your whole program be licensed to your customer under the GPL. Take a deep breath and go do it.
Section 2c requires that, if your displays a copyright notice on startup, it also gives details of the license. Weasel out of this by not displaying any copyright notice or startup message.
Section 3 requires that you distribute the source with the program. It offers a number of ways to do this, but 3a is the most promising. Copy all the source onto an unlabelled CD-R and hand it to your customer’s CEO. Warn the CEO of the danger to his company’s competitive advantage should another bank get hold of the CD-R. Recommend to him/her that they burn the CD-R and shred the ashes.2
Of course there are some details that I’ve left out, but no show-stoppers. Provided that your customer’s CEO doesn’t give away the source code, you now have a money earning, GPLed, and—for all intents and purposes—proprietary product.
Just a thought.
1 I Am Not A Lawyer. I am not legally or morally qualified to give legal advice. For that matter, I am not legally or morally qualified to give business advice. Don’t blame me if you try it and it doesn’t work.
2 It’s kind of neat that section 1 requires you to distribute a copy of the GPL with the source; your customer will be burning and shredding the GPL along with their source.
Comments
I realize that you intended this to be humorous, but really, I think that this is very much a viable business model. Most corporations GREATLY overestimate the value of the software that they own. With access only to the source code but without access to the developers who wrote it, one CAN get something useful, but only through a good deal of effort. Plus, I'd guess that 80% or more of code is customized to meet that customer's particular needs. The truth is that reuse is HARD (though incredibly valuable), and so most software can be made public without much risk of its being reused.
That would NOT apply to certain kinds of products... if Adobe released code to Photoshop or Microsoft released code to Windows, then people WOULD make the effort to comprehend and reuse it. But are YOU writing Photoshop?