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

[simo]

On Tue, 2011-03-15 at 08:02 +0000, Alex Hudson wrote:
> 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.

They sell support contract for Ubuntu, why not ?

> 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.

Bollocks.

Simo

-- 
Simo Sorce
Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer <simo at samba.org>
Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. <simo at redhat.com>