[Freeciv] Re: forced open source

[Tomasz Wegrzanowski <maniek@xxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jul 20, 2000 at 11:05:51PM -0700, Stan Shebs wrote:
> 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.

You can't legally distribute GPL work linked with QPL.
QPL isn't GPL-compatible, and GPL requires you to
distribute all sources under GPL-compatible license
if you distribute binary.
That's why Debian doesn't distribute KDE.

> > 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???

If ``compatibility'' would be ``copyright infgingement'',
1/3rd of packages in average distribution would be illegal.

> (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...)

They might be making bussiness with Hasbro, but if someone
lawsuited opensource project on base of ``compatibility'', and won,
their mere existence would be in danger, as 1/3rd of what they distribute,
some code packages included, is more-or-less clones of some proprietary 
software.

They don't care about freeciv.
They care about themselves.

> > 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?

Do they sell games ONLY for Linux ?
Or is this about 1% of their total profit ?