Subject: need debating points
crawford@goingware.com
Date: Wed Feb 09 2000 - 01:23:03 CST
My fiance and I have been planning for me to write a commercial program, that
will be a vertical market product. Customers will get the product individually
delivered and tailored to their needs, and the hardware it runs on will usually all
come as a unit. A turnkey system that I will configure for the client, although I'll
try my best to have a small set of reusable canned solutions.
The product will be largely composed of open source code running on Linux, a
free software OS. Note I make the distinction between open source and free
software - when I mean free software, I mean as in the GPL.
A relatively small proportion of the code involved will be written by me, but it will
be pretty involved and difficult, and it is largely the integration that creates the
value.
So I'm a big fan of free software, and want to contribute to free software, and feel if
I'm ever going to do it I'm really going to have to knuckle under and do it and stop
writing proprietary code for clients who take all the rights and keep the source,
and write some real GPL'ed code of some real use.
The only "free" code I have is some screensavers (nice screensavers though) and
an SDK for an interapplication spellchecking protocol I developed called Word
Services (see http://www.wordservices.org - I plan to put it into the BeOS and
MacOS AbiWord at some point. It's OS specific; could be done on X but would
take further architectural groundwork).
So my fiance was perfectly horrified when I suggested that I do this as an open
source project. Actually what I want to do is free software - if I open source it at
all it will be copylefted; I have no intention of giving away code that people can
use for proprietary products.
I personally have all kinds of good reasons for doing this, reasons that don't make
a bit of sense to my fiance. What can I say to her? It's important to be concrete.
References to URL's and open source/free software commercial success stories
are also very appropriate.
Regards,
Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com
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