[Gllug] LDP licence and Debian.

[William Palfreman]

On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, David Damerell wrote:

> If it was GPLed, how could you possibly prevent it from becoming as
> much part of Debian as anything in 'main' is?

You couldn't, and I wasn't implying that you should.  Just as I read the
Debian constitution if a Debian developer wants to bring an external
package into Debian, he becomes the maintainer of what amounts to a
Debian port, no matter how little it diverges from the package itself.  
But if a package is developed within Debian itself, the whole package is
under Debian control and voting rules.  I think external development
with a third party choosing whether or not to add something to Debian
would be better, that's all.

> >as the democracy side could get you kicked off the project,
> 
> I've never noticed Debian having an ability to change upstream
> maintainers. 

Yes, upstream or within.  I think being upstream is better, rather than
something being part of Debian as an internal project.  If you were
internal, and *not upstream* then the project would be under full Debian
control - otherwise I have badly misread the Debian constitution.

> >anyway, Debian's non-commercial status makes a Cygnus style business
> >impossible
> 
> Um? There'd be nothing to stop you from charging for modifications and
> support.

I'm not saying there isn't.  What I was thinking of was a company that
provided commercial EPOS systems from the ground up - the kit, the
training, the networking, the servers, the OS, and the EPOS and stock
control applications themselves.  The advantage of doing the last part
as GPL is that you immediately make it much harder for your established
competitors, most of whom charge thousands of pounds in licence fees
for borderline useless products written for DOS/NT combinations.  A BSD
licensed product would would allow then to take your product
proprietary, but with GPL they can't use your product without going onto
a GPL basis themselves - the GPLness is a way of breaking into something
currently very proprietary.  Any business wanting an EPOS and stock
control setup doesn't care about the software anyway, what they want is
something that works and they want to pay someone to sort it out so the
non-technical manager can have things scanned through the checkout and
generate invoices automatically.  I can see some Python and some
Postgres, and a big fat support contract :-).  Another advantage of GPL
here is that it allows similar companies to get involved in other
countries, where it wouldn't normally be easy for a British EPOS company
to set up in just like that.  Before you know it you have revolutionised
the EPOS business , put all the old NT and SCO vendors out of business,
and Linux is running on every till in the country.  And the company that
did this would make a fortune from providing all the setup and support.  
Not quite "Next year we'll be millionaires Rodney", because it would take
a year or two to get right, and then you have to sell it.  But I can
definitely see it as a real business.  The Debian bit is incidental - it
is just the obvious platform to do it on.  I can just see 10,000 tills
apt-getting to the latest stable, all done remotely without site visits.  
With Redhat based EPOS you would end up supporting un-upgradable Redhat
6.2 systems - or whatever the current out-of-date-but-stable distro was,
and not be able to do anything to them because the customer likes thing
how they are ("It works, doesn't it?") and having to support multiple
legacy versions on legacy OSes.  With Debian you would know what stable
release is going to be, and you can ensure they system works on it and
you have a smooth upgrade path at your end.

So, although it may sound like I am having a go at Debian, I'm not.  
Cygnus may be able to operate within the FSF, but unless I have totally
misread the Debian Constitution that is completely forbidden - Debian is
wholly non-commercial and has only individual developers.  So Cygnus
style companies have to be upstream - right?

Bill.

-- 
W. Palfreman. 		http://www.palfreman.com/william/
Tel: 0771 355 0354	PGP ftp://ftp.palfreman.com/pub/wfpkey.asc


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