Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!usc!srhqla!quad1!ttidca!mb
From: mb@ttidca.TTI.COM (Michael Bloom)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: GNU Support (was: GNU Make 3.58 on HP-UX 7.0 ?)
Message-ID: <20195@ttidca.TTI.COM>
Date: 29 Sep 90 18:00:24 GMT
References: <1990Sep17.201337.15659@bpdsun1.uucp> <7370218@hpfcso.HP.COM>
Organization: Citicorp/TTI, Santa Monica
Lines: 67

In article <7370218@hpfcso.HP.COM> mjs@hpfcso.HP.COM (Marc Sabatella) writes:

>The GNU license agreement pretty much forbids us from providing any reasonable
>kind of support.

If this is HP's official line, it's a cop-out. There is nothing in the
agreement to prevent you from providing support.  For example, Cygnus,
Inc.'s sole product is support for software that fulls under the terms
of the GNU license. And they get at least $100,000 smackers a pop!
 
>		  In particular, we could not sell any of it (only give it
>away), so it would be hard to fund the support.

You can sell as many GNU products as you want.  You just can't tell
the buyer not to give it away. Is this so alien?  

You will have no trouble "funding the support" because: buyers like
"one-stop" shopping.  They will pay you recurring support fees because
they bought the "whole package", software and hardware from you, and
they will do so because they want support regardless of whether the
object to be supported is the compiler you sold them, the OS you sold
them, or the hardware you sold them. 

With the GNU software, you are even free to sell support for code you
didn't sell them. If they got the compiler from someone else but got
the OS from you, you can sock it to them twice - once for the annual
cost of supporting the OS, and once again for the annual cost of
supporting the compiler. If you chose to, that is.  You might not want
to support a version that you did not supply. Fortunately, there is
nothing in the GNU license that requires you to support the GNU
software, no matter where the customer got it from. Thus, you can
choose to only sell support for the version purchased from you.  So,
the customer can get the compiler from anyone, but if he wants you to
support the software, he has to PAY you for the software. Sure, he can
give it away, but the recipient would be without support unless (or
until) he paid you for support.

Major chip makers (including motorola and intel) as well as computer
manufacturers (including your own competitors) have committed to
selling and supporting GNU CC. Do you think they have done this
planning to go broke, or just might they have a business strategy in
mind?

>Actually, no one has really managed to make sense out of Stallman's copyleft
>from a legal standpoint; we are forced to assume the most restrictive
>interpretation.

In fact, there do happen to be people who can read english and the
other languages that the copyleft has been translated to (by
translators who were able to make sense out of it in multiple
languages, no less).  Perhaps you should rephrase that as: "we are forced
(by the desire to fall behind our competitors) to interpret the document
instead of reading it."

>That, plus we have a significant investment in our products, and many customers
>have an investment in some of our value added features like FPA support,
>Fortran, etc.  At best we would have to support both our own products and
>Gnu's, and we don't have the resources for that.

Well, guess whose products I'm going to buy?


  Michael Bloom
  mb@ttidca.tti.com

 "The views represented above are my own, and I make no claim as to the
  compatibility of these views with those of my employer"