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hiding the source do NOT necesarily go hand in hand. In fact hiding the source can very well hinder sales if you're a small shop because customers like to know that if you disappear that can find someone else to do maintainance on the software. For the last ten years my bills and those of my employees have been paid by a software package we did in Perl. Redhat Inc. has of course made millions form Anaaconda and other open source software they've written. For our main product, the source is available to all users so they can inspect it, understand the system, and do customization or maintainance if required. In fact, very few of them do any customization - they come to us for that because we understand the system best and have done similar customizations before. They like knowing that tey have FULL use of the software they bought - not some encrpyted thing that will become useless if an update is needed to work with one some new system or something. We haven't had any problem with people copying our software and us losing business from that. It just hasn't been a problem and probably wouldn't be for you either. While our source is available to all customers, our main product is not actually free software because we don't give redistribution rights. Customers can modify the software but can't LEGALLY resell it. (Not that people on the internet pay much attention to copyright law.) However, customers like the fact that our license says it will be licensed under the GPL if we ever cease to support it for any reason. Other software we sell is GPL. People COULD get similar software elsewhere without paying for it, but they come to us with cash in hand because they want our help selecting and installing the best software for the job, they want our modifications, and they want us to be available for questions after the sale. If license issues are causing you in trouble and you're writing Linux, FreeBSD, etc. software you might try selling it under the GPL and see how that goes. The doesn't mean you can't sell it and make good money. Quote:
I'm saying that if what you have in mind right now is "pretty long and relatively complex", then it's going to be more complex by the time it's ready for release, even more complex a year later after new additions and features are added, and so SHOULD be written in a programming language like Perl, Python, etc. rather than in a user interface language like bash. C might be appropriate, but if the shell was your first instinct than Perl is probably an appropriate "one step up". |
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Once again thank you for your detailed explanation. Really Really appreciate it. |
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We might go GPL for everything soon. Ten years ago, when we first released our one big money maker software, we knew it was going to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars because it was a unique new solution to a problem facing many businesses. We also knew that one company in particular would likely be wanting to copy from it, a company that was much bigger than us, with much better marketing, so we thought it best to maintain as much control as possible to avoid having the "competitor" end up making all of the money from our unique new ideas. As mentioned before, our license does provide that everything becomes GPL if we dissapear. Quote:
for simple programs. As programs get more complex, the lack of power and flexibility of the shell makes it no longer quick and easy. Anything that the shell can do can absolutely be done in C. This must be true because all that the shell does is call C programs - the real work is always done in C. Perl too can do just about anything - in ten years the only thing I can think of that I've come across that couldn't be done in Perl is a kernel module, such as a device driver. Certain things that require really heavy duty bit banging such as low level graphics work or things that have to be SUPER fast aren't the best jobs for Perl. C is better if you have to do more than about a few thousand "things" per second. Even for these jobs, though, you can use C libraries from Perl, so Perl can do advanced graphics work and such - you just wouldn't write the library in Perl. So in short - the shell for simple things that take less than an hour to write, Perl or another scripting language for more complex stuff, and C for kernel modules and programs that do something thousands of times per second. |
This has so far been one of the best forum discussion experience for me.
As promised I have summarized the entire discussion (to a great extent) on this blog. In fact I am not anywhere near a blogger as you can guess that this is my only 2nd blog. My first blog was just a trail blog. Here is the link for the blog: http://evolvingminds.wordpress.com/2...sues-gpl-lgpl/ Make sure you leave a constructive comment or any suggestion if you have one. |
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