Hi
Whenever I meet a director or CEO of a software company and talk to them about FSF and talk them into considering licensing their software with GPL, at first they listed but then the fear factor takes over.
The Fear Factor: - What if the competition uses my code and shuts my company down?
How does one respond to the fear?
Anyone knows of documents or articles on the NET that talks about this worry and how it can be overcome?
The reason I'm having difficulty is because I'm not sure about this either.
Anyone / Any comments?
Regards
Rishi
Rishi,
Rishi Gangoly wrote:
Whenever I meet a director or CEO of a software company and talk to them about FSF and talk them into considering licensing their software with GPL, at first they listed but then the fear factor takes over.
The link below might help answer some of your questions.
Open Source as a Business Strategy by Brian Behlendorf
Brian is a co-founder and a core member of the Apache Group.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/brian.html
HTH,
Lenish
Rishi Gangoly said on Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 12:10:18AM +0530,:
- What if the competition uses my code and shuts my company down?
How does one respond to the fear?
1) www.gnu.org/philosophy/software-libre-commercial-viability.html 2) www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.html 3) www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html 4) www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
If you use a copyleft (not merely `free') license, you can prevent others from misappropriating your code.
Whenever I meet a director or CEO of a software company and talk to them about FSF and talk them into considering licensing their software with GPL, at first they listed but then the fear factor takes over.
1. Don't worry too much about what they think. While their help is welcome, we must never feel we desperately need it.
2. Show them the example of TrollTech and MySQL.
3. Say, "If your competitor distributes a version of this, you will be able to use his improvements."
Don't expect to convince them all, or even the majority.
-
Lenish Namath -
Mahesh T. Pai -
Richard Stallman -
Rishi Gangoly