I agree with your take on Mozilla. AOL is never going to be able to sell copies of mozilla. However, since that is not how they make money, it works out well for them.
Just imagine how badly their XP negotiations with Microsoft would be going right now if they didn't have the Mozilla trump card up their sleeve. They would be screwed. AOL needs an independent browser, and the GPL allows them to build one without fronting all of the costs themselves. If you look at the commits you would notice that their are plenty of hackers with email addresses from other companies. That is valuable work that AOL does not have to pay for. So the GPL is definitely working in AOL's favor.
And just because a piece of software is GPLed doesn't necessarily mean that it can't be a source of income. Cygnus was able to make money for years supporting gcc. They got greedy during the tech fever on the stock market, but that doesn't necessarily mean that their business plan before that was invalid.
In fact, there are lots of companies that wouldn't have even had a prayer of being successful without the GPL. No one was interested in yet another proprietary widget set. And yet thanks to the fact that they released under the GPL QT became popular with hackers and now TrollTech is able to sell proprietary licenses of their software to people who don't want to make free software (but still want to use QT).
The folks developing MySQL are another good example of how to make money off of a GPLed product. Who would be interested in yet another proprietary database (especially one as limited as MySQL). However, if you give it away for free, and sell service and support then your product has a good chance of becoming quite popular. And the fact that independent developers will help you improve the product doesn't hurt either.
Sure, there are a lot of developers working on Free Software that aren't ever going to get paid for it, but there are lots of hackers that are getting paid to hack on Free Software, and their are some fairly successful businesses that are using this model.
Re:No one's going to be selling anything as a serv (Score:2)
I agree with your take on Mozilla. AOL is never going to be able to sell copies of mozilla. However, since that is not how they make money, it works out well for them.
Just imagine how badly their XP negotiations with Microsoft would be going right now if they didn't have the Mozilla trump card up their sleeve. They would be screwed. AOL needs an independent browser, and the GPL allows them to build one without fronting all of the costs themselves. If you look at the commits you would notice that their are plenty of hackers with email addresses from other companies. That is valuable work that AOL does not have to pay for. So the GPL is definitely working in AOL's favor.
And just because a piece of software is GPLed doesn't necessarily mean that it can't be a source of income. Cygnus was able to make money for years supporting gcc. They got greedy during the tech fever on the stock market, but that doesn't necessarily mean that their business plan before that was invalid.
In fact, there are lots of companies that wouldn't have even had a prayer of being successful without the GPL. No one was interested in yet another proprietary widget set. And yet thanks to the fact that they released under the GPL QT became popular with hackers and now TrollTech is able to sell proprietary licenses of their software to people who don't want to make free software (but still want to use QT).
The folks developing MySQL are another good example of how to make money off of a GPLed product. Who would be interested in yet another proprietary database (especially one as limited as MySQL). However, if you give it away for free, and sell service and support then your product has a good chance of becoming quite popular. And the fact that independent developers will help you improve the product doesn't hurt either.
Sure, there are a lot of developers working on Free Software that aren't ever going to get paid for it, but there are lots of hackers that are getting paid to hack on Free Software, and their are some fairly successful businesses that are using this model.