Re: [OT] mothers, free software

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Fri, 2005-11-18 at 09:14 +1100, Benno wrote:
> >>From a business perspective, the risk of free software is that your
> >competitor can use your code against you. The benefit of free software
> >is that your competitor cannot undercut you on price, which makes you
> >very very hard to dislodge from your market position unless you screw up
> >pretty badly.
> 
> Sleepycat seem to be an example to the contrary. They make most
> of their money frmo licensing their GPLed software. (I can find the
> reference if anyone is interested.. I'd need to dig through my 
> email though.)

The last time I talked to Margo and Keith about this, Sleepycat's main
revenue source was from *non*-free licenses. They use a dual license.
The pattern seems to be that a vendor develops something using the GPL
version and then pays for a proprietary license so that they don't have
to release the rest of their code.

I'ld be interested to know if that situation has changed.

shap