Going about beta-testing a program... advice?

[cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org]

> Anton Markov wrote:
> > Actually, MySQL is licenced under a commercial license _and_ GPL, which
> > does allow free commercial use. Your license does not. That is
> > definetely a stopper if you are trying to get community involvement, but
> > at least your boss gets to make some money, so it's not necessairely a
> > bad thing.
> > 
> > As far as the market niche goes, I definetely see the need for a
> > new-generation user-friendly backup program. Something that is designed
> > for USB HDs and CD/DVD-R media, not tape. The only GPL alternative I
> > know is DAR (and KDar), but they still lack the user-friendly element.
> > (I know about Mondo, but it was too inflexible so it didn't worked as I
> > wanted).

> Really? I didn't think that was possible. I will need to look into how
> MySQL does that and maybe I can get my boss to agree to that same
> license for our program.

Linux, the putative topic of this mailing list, would NEVER have become
even as much as a curiosity had it been licensed under similar
provisions to MySQL.

The "comparable" thing would have been for Linus Torvalds to have
announced:

 "Hey, everyone!  I have implemented a new OS kernel for the 80386
  architecture.  You can try it out; if you use it for anything at all
  commercial, you'll have to pay me $450 per CPU."

If all the people building 'open source' software went by the same sort
of standard, well, "hobbyists" could use a Linux distribution for free,
but anyone using it for a web server at work would wind up having to
send in license fees to each of:

 - Linus Torvalds (for Linux)
 - Ulrich Drepper (for GLIBC)
 - The Apache Foundation (obvious?)
 - OpenBSD folk (for OpenSSH)
 - Larry Wall (for Perl)
 - and a further cast of hundreds...

And you'd easily be expected to pay between different levels, thousands
of dollars per host.

Linux would obviously NOT have taken off; no corporation would allow
this kind of liability inside their door, and we'd all be using some
flavour of BSD, where they _don't_ play this kind of licensing fee game.

The economic "win" that comes out of free software comes from the
sharing of benefit of USAGE.  

It's clear that it is worth developing software and *giving it away*
because everyone gets the benefit of not having to pay licensing fees
for all the software that they _didn't_ have to pay for.

The "dual licensing" game is essentially a bait-and-switch ploy that
allows organizations that are producing proprietary, privately-held and
privately-developed software to feign involvement in the free software
community.

They get free advertising out of the exercise, and, if they're lucky, an
external set of advocates marketing their products for them.
--
"cbbrowne","@","ntlug.org"
http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/sap.html
Where do you want to Tell Microsoft To Go Today?
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml