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

[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, 2011-03-15 at 09:36 +0100, Matthias Kirschner wrote:
> * Alex Hudson <home at alexhudson.com> [2011-03-15 08:02:02 +0000]:
> > 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.
> 
> How do you argue when you explain that Ubuntu is not commercial?

To be honest it's never come up. I've never met anyone who thought that
it was. I don't see that the 10% or whatever polish the Ubuntu community
add to Debian as making it amazingly different to Debian, and I
certainly don't see Debian as commercial software.

I also don't know where you'd draw the line. If Ubuntu is, is Kubuntu?
Is Xubuntu? It doesn't work like that.

If you say software is commercial if at any point some group of people
are poised to make money out of it or services surrounding it, or are
paid to contribute to it, then basically all software is commercial,
sure. But that seems to me just another version of the One True Scotsman
fallacy.

For me, software is commercial software if you enter into a transaction
to obtain/use it. "Commercial" is the adjective applied to the noun
"software", not the developers, the financiers, or anyone else.

Cheers

Alex.


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