["Daniele Brevi" <danibrevi@xxxxxxxxx>]

 Dalla mailing list di ethereal una simpatica discussione sul modello di
businnes del software libero


> Oggetto: Re: [Ethereal-users] Questions
> 
> Sungchan Choi wrote:
> 
> >  Thanks for providing the free ethereal software. It's very 
> useful in 
> > developing protocol analysis tool and I have a question 
> regarding your 
> > business model. You supply your product for free, then from 
> what you 
> > get profit?
> 
> For most of us, from nowhere. :-)
> 
> As with GCC, the Linux kernel, {Free,Net,Open,Dragonfly}BSD, 
> GNOME, KDE, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, etc., the 
> software isn't sold, so there's no profit.
> 
> The development for free software is "paid for" in various ways.
> 
> Some companies exist that accept contracts to develop new 
> features or other improvements to free software, and 
> contribute the results of their development to the free 
> software project.  They might, in some cases, provide the 
> results to their customers immediately, and contribute the 
> results to the project some amount of time later, so their 
> customers get "early access" - if the customers don't then 
> supply the software in binary form to others without allowing 
> those others to give the results away or to get the source 
> code to the changes and give *those* away, that doesn't 
> violate the GPL.  Cygnus did that for various GNU tools such 
> as GCC and GDB; Red Hat, who bought Cygnus, might be doing that.
> 
> Some companies exist that sell support contracts for free 
> software, and provide support only to paying customers.  Red 
> Hat does that for Linux distributions, for example.
> 
> Some companies might consider some piece of free software to 
> be a "commodity" - for example, they might consider operating 
> systems to be a commodity - and make their money from 
> hardware or consulting, and contribute to the development of 
> that free software.  That might be IBM's view of Linux.
> 
> Some companies might use a tool and add capabilities to it 
> because it helps them in their work, and consider it to be a 
> good idea to contribute those additions to the free-software 
> project for that tool. 
> They might think that not having to maintain their changes as 
> a separate version of the software, re-integrating them into 
> each new release of the software, is worth letting their 
> competitors have access to the changes.
> 
> The Ethereal project doesn't have a business model because 
> it's not a business.  (Ethereal has a .com domain because 
> ethereal.org wasn't available - somebody else had it.)
> 
> There is at least one company providing support, training, 
> and custom development for Ethereal:
> 
> 	http://www.etherealsoft.com/
> 
> There are also companies that have developed new capabilities 
> for Ethereal and contributed them back.  I think much of the 
> VoIP capabilities fall into that category, as the 
> contributions often come from people with e-mail addresses in 
> domains belonging to makers of telephone equipment or to 
> telephone companies.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ethereal-users mailing list
> Ethereal-users@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://www.ethereal.com/mailman/listinfo/ethereal-users
>