Who knows the GPL well?

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

Greg Rundlett wrote:
> If you can find out who has a copy of the program (users/'customers'),
> then you can ask them to kindly take advantage of their right to share
> the source code.  Trying to charge a high price for GPL'd software is
> doomed to fail in the long-run if the product is useful.  Eventually a
> paid customer will invoke their priviledge to share the source code --
> even when they might have paid a high monetary price for it.

Not necessarily.  Why would a company want to share something they paid
for with their competitors?

There's a difference between industry-specialized software and stuff
that someone would want to use for a hobby.  The 'hobby' case is where
most of the code that actually does get shared falls into.

If your "GPL" software is so specialized that only 4 people in the world
would be interested in it, and assuming they are all competing with each
other, you could bet that any given person of that group wouldn't want
to share his copy with the others, just to be a nice guy (they are
*competitors*, remember?).

And I don't think the "you get other's contributions for free" argument
would be much incentive either.  They are after all probably paying the
original distributor for a support contract, so they can get the
features *they* need implemented.  Furthermore, the one guy's new
features are most likely specific to his product, and useless to the others.

Now, I'm not anti-GPL, and I'm not claiming that these arguments always
hold.  Only in the case of very specialized software that hobbyists
would never be interested in.  In particular, it's easy to see that for
software that fulfills basic services, like apache/httpd, the "you get
other's contributions for free" argument carries a lot of weight.  But
once you get more specialized, the arguments for sharing are less
compelling.

--Matt