Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 14 Feb 2005 14:57:04 -0800 | Subject | Re: [BK] upgrade will be needed | From | (Larry McVoy) |
| |
On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 11:24:43PM +0100, Gerold Jury wrote: > Hi Larry > Hi Everyone > > Do you think it is possible to make a split licence that will distinguish > between active changes and passive watching/tracking ?
A lot of people have told us to create two products, the free product and the commercial product, and license the free product with standard licensing terms. The expectation is that we would somehow make the free product less desirable so that people bought the commercial product.
That's an excellent suggestion if our only goal is to make money, that makes the free product sort of a teaser and the commercial product the real deal. However, the goal really is to help the open source community, Linux in particular. If we give away crippled software then all the people who say we are just a money grubbing corporation are more or less correct. At that point we aren't giving away the good stuff and it was always the goal that you got the latest and greatest because that's what can do you the most good.
However, it sure sounds like the noisy people would be a lot happier with a stripped down BK that didn't have as many of the restrictions. And a possible out for even the open source users is that they buy seats if they really need the more powerful features. Or we could donate some on a case by case basis.
If the hackers who are using BK can reach agreement that it would be better if the BK they had didn't move forward unless they got commercial seats then we could start moving towards a license on the free product that was less restrictive. What that would mean is that the BK you have is basically it, we'd not advance it other than keeping it up to date with the protocol and/or file formats of the commercial version. If you think BK is good enough, fast enough, done enough that you don't want what we have coming down the pike we can go that route.
I suspect that the heavy lifters really would like a faster BK with more features that help them get their job done but the rank and file could care less, they just want checkin/checkout. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |