Commercial Software (was: Re: Nokia spreading FUD?)

[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, 2011-03-15 at 08:44 +0100, Matthias Kirschner wrote:
> Would anyone here disagree that software is commercial as soon as people
> are paid to develop it? 

I think there's a difference between software developed commercially and
commercial software - just because people are paid to write it isn't the
crucial difference for me. Indeed, even if people got compensation of
some sort, I wouldn't necessarily call it commercial: soliciting
donations, for example, doesn't make software commercial for me, even if
it pulls in a considerate amount each month.

I would struggle to label most free software as commercial on that
basis. RHEL would be an example I suppose, but I wouldn't call Ubuntu
commercial.

Of course commerciality isn't equivalent to non-freedom but it's pretty
indicative and if you used it as a rule of thumb you'd probably be right
99.999% of the time.

Cheers

Alex.


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