From: mathew <mathew@mantis.co.uk>
Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: Re: Fund raising at the FSF
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 93 17:23:22 GMT
Organization: Mantis Consultants, Cambridge. UK.
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vinsci@brando.uwasa.fi (Leonard Norrgard) writes:
>mathew (mathew@mantis.co.uk) wrote:
>> More likely, if X had been under the GPL, the manufacturer wouldn't have
>> adapted it to run on his hardware, and nor would many other manufacturers. 
>> You'd probably be running OpenLook or NeWS, with no hope of any sort of
>> source, let alone source tailored to your machine.
> 
> I note that you don't back up your belief.

Who do you think I am, Dr Who?

>                                              Hardware manufacturers
> like DEC primarily want to sell the hardware they make (a reasonable
> assumption).  If porting a GPL licensed software package to that
> hardware at a small cost would drastically help selling the hardware,
> it seems natural that that is what the hardware manufacturer would do.

Right.  But if the software sellers haven't backed X, the presence of X won't
help the hardware sellers to sell their hardware.  Therefore they won't
bother to port X to their hardware.  And I contend that the presence of the
GPL on something hinders its acceptance by software sellers.

>> Again, if you buy undocumented hardware, what do you expect?
> 
> As far as I know, Digital didn't say that it would be impossible to
> get hardware details.  Also, since DEC previously have provided
> detailed hardware information, I suppose nobody suspected things would
> be any different now.

Well, it sounds to me like you have a serious gripe with DEC.  Why not take
it up with them?

>> If you want special restrictive licenses to save you from the consequences 
> of
>> your organization's actions, let's go the whole hog.  Let's include a secti
> on
>> in the GPL demanding that anyone who distributes GPL code must port it to a
> ny
>> other system on demand, free of charge.  Then people who buy hardware that
>> nobody supports won't have to face the consequences of their stupidity.
> 
> Your sense of humour seems to be on the bizarre side.

True, but irrelevant.  You were suggesting that the GPL was good, because it
would make sure people would be able to get source even if they bought from
restrictive and unhelpful manufacturers.  I'm took that attitude to its
logical conclusion...

>> > Nice try.  The support we have to buy now costs more than it would
>> > cost us to port X ourselves (my estimation).  By the way, the
>> > manufacturer is Digital Equipment Corp. (who participated in
>> > developing the original free X), and the product is their VXT 2000
>> > X-terminal.
>> 
>> If the support costs are that high, it must be cheaper to sell off all the
>> DEC hardware second hand and replace it with something better.  Or at least
>> something that you know what it does.
> 
> Nope.  You're overestimating the costs of porting X.

Eh?

Let S be the support cost.
Let P be the cost of porting X.
Let H be the cost of replacing the hardware.

You estimate that S > P.  But you have to pay S every year, as it's a support
contract.  For some time t the value S*t becomes greater than P+H.  Hence
in the long term, it is cheaper to trash the DEC stations.  Perhaps you could
plug in some numbers and work out t.


mathew
Xref: sparky gnu.misc.discuss:4409 talk.philosophy.misc:3271 misc.legal:22383