On Tue, 2011-03-15 at 11:34 +0100, Matthias Kirschner wrote:
Cannonical is doing buisiness with Ubuntu. So why isn't Ubuntu commercial? Same if I use Debian to implement a solution with my company for another company (like some of http://www.debian.org/consultants/ do). This solution includes software. If I sell the solution, why wouldn't the software be commercial software?
Both these questions are answered by what I said previously:
If you say software is commercial if at any point some group of people are poised to make money out of it or services surrounding it, or are paid to contribute to it, then basically all software is commercial, sure. But that seems to me just another version of the One True Scotsman fallacy.
Because basically your argument here is reducing to "if I can find anyone gaining in some way by virtue of <product>, it is a commercial product" - and you then have nice malleable boundaries that you can stretch around anything.
Is Debian non-commercial? No true non-commercial piece of software could be _sold_ for _money_ !! ... (etc. etc.)
I'm just not sure I buy that logic, "non-commercial" ends up being the empty set.
For me, software is commercial software if you enter into a transaction to obtain/use it. "Commercial" is the adjective applied to the noun "software", not the developers, the financiers, or anyone else.
So in your view software can only be commercial if a) you have to pay for license fees or b) the software is bundled with hardware for which you pay (e.g. Free Software on your mobile, your dsl router, your PC)?
No. I would view Emacs as being commercial being (as was, at least) the FSF would sell copies of it. I view RHEL has being commercial. They're both free software.
Look, this whole thing is an attempt to divide software into two categories which aren't even mutually exclusive. Free vs. non-free _is_ mutually exclusive, so obviously you can't sensibly map from one to the other.
But that doesn't mean that "commercial" doesn't have a broad meaning which is understood in similar terms by most people: it does. And honestly, the argument that "all free software can be commercial!" which technically true is essentially an attempt to avoid a discussion about how people can earn money directly from software development without needing to resort to services/other ancillary offerings. Being honest, most free software isn't commercial, and authoring free software as a vocation is extremely difficult to turn into an earning job.
Cheers
Alex.
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