[Freeciv] Re: forced open source

[Stan Shebs <shebs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jul 20, 2000 at 10:11:58AM -0700, Stan Shebs wrote:
> 
> If RedHat or SuSe had any interest in legality of their RPMs,
> they wouldn't distribute KDE at all.

Why not?  Is there a copyright owner alleging that KDE infringes
on their copyright?  I haven't heard of such a claim myself.

> If they get such a letter, they would probably forward it to ./ and all
> other places of interest, and under no circumstances obey it,

And alienate their corporate customers that pay them actual
money that pays their salaries?  I can see you've never actually
worked at one of these open-source companies!  Hasbro may even be
paying Red Hat for support as we speak - when I was at Cygnus, our
customer list had companies and organizations that you would not
imagine...

> because then they would be flooded by hundreds of similar letters,
> from Sun, Apple, MS, AT&T, etc.

What on earth are you talking about???

(BTW, what makes you think the companies you list are not currently
doing business with Red Hat?  Have a look through Red Hat/Cygnus' old
press releases...)

> It's quite difficult to make money from writing proprietary GNU/Linux 
> software.
> Nobody managed to do it yet, and I doubt anyone will.

Loki has certainly made money selling games for Linux.  I don't
know if they're profitable or not, as a private company they
don't have to report their finances - are you saying you have
some inside info to share with us?

Stan