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Walking the open-source tightrope

Evan Leibovitch | March 6, 2001 12:00 AM PST

Summary

Can software developers keep the open-source world happy while charging for free software?

Topics

Evan Leibovitch, Technology News
Over the last few weeks I've been talking about open-source businessmodels. I've spoken about thedifficulties facing software aggregators (such as Linuxdistributors) and the opportunitiesfor support providers (such as VARs).

But it's with actual software development that the desires of some to makea profit run head-on into the philosophies of the free software movement,Richard Stallman, and the GNU project.

The moment you assert ownership of software in such a manner that you,exclusively, are able to charge money for its use, you're going to runafoul of free software advocates, no matter how you try to sugar-coat it.The definition offree software is pretty explicit, and doesn't allow for anyrestrictions on how programs may be copied, modified, or used. Evensoftware that is free for personal but not commercial use is consideredneither free software nor open source. So there's not a lot ofroom to move.

Having said that, a number of companies have tried some novel approachesto walk this tightrope. They want to earn some revenue from licensing feeswithout angering too many parts of the Linux community.

One of the more novel ones came from British developer Vita Nuova, whoseunique approach to licensing I described last year. You pay once to license the company's InfernoOS, then can redistribute as much as you want of the binaries (and much ofthe source) without extra fees. While interesting, this approach hasn't madeInferno (now in its third release) visible outside the embedded market.

More interesting is an approach that, in the abstract, makes completecommon sense -- at least if you're making software development tools: Ifsomeone uses your tool to make free software, they can use your tool forfree. If someone uses your tools to make software for resale, they pay youto use the tool. The logic seems clear enough. If someone is going to earnrevenue from software created (in part) by your tools, then those toolshave monetary value and you, their maker, are entitled to a cut of therevenue.

Currently there are two high-profile practitioners of this approach -- onea well-known name that's new to Linux, the other a low-profile creator ofthe core of one of Linux's most popular components.

The household name is Borland,which recently announced the Kylix integrated developmentenvironment (IDE), closely related to its successful Delphi product. Kylixhas debuted to favorable reviews and reportsthat suggest Kylix will help Linux be accepted in the enterprise byattracting developers used to working in a Visual Basic-type environment.

Borland went out of its way to make no enemies in the open-source community.The Kylix home page sports links to its "partners" at both GNOME and KDE,as well as a "resource" link to Stallman's Free Software Foundation. And when itannounced Kylix's coming availability at the recent LinuxWorld, Borlandpromised that a special Open Edition would be available for freedownload, providing full Kylix capabilities at no cost to anyone using itto make open-source software. Anyone wanting to use Kylix to makeproprietary software would be required to pay $1,000 per developmentsystem for the same code.

This clearly won't make everyone happy. Already a project called Lazarus has sprung up todevelop a competitive IDE that's 100-percent open source. Still, I thinkKylix is a legitimate effort to meet free software developers part way.Though most C developers I know sneer at Kylix/Delphi's Pascal roots, Istill see the system appealing to those who like the idea of ahigh-quality Linux IDE. It will no doubt be shunned by free softwarepurists, but I can see other open-source programmers taking Borland upon its offer.

Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't give proper credit to the companythat first developed Kylix's licensing concept -- TrollTech, the Norwegian companywhose Qtlibraries form the underlying framework of Linux's popular KDE desktop.Qt is available under two licenses. One is the GPL itself, whichprohibits anyone using Qt (licensed this way) from using it to write ordeploy non-free software. The other license, available from TrollTech,allows non-free software to be developed with Qt.

The original Qt license wasn't anywhere near this flexible. In fact, freesoftware advocates considered it bad enough that they started the GNOME project as an alternative to theQt-based KDE. Today the two desktops compete on technical and visualmerit, instead of the "my license is freer than yours" puffery that markedthe desktops' earlier days.

Was it pressure from free software advocates that forced Troll to inventthis hybrid approach? Probably. But what's important is that Troll andothers such as Borland have developed a model that furthers some of thegoals of free software advocates without producing software that's 100percent free itself.

Do you think the TrollTech/Borland approach to software licensing isworkable? Tell Evan the TalkBack below or in the ZDNet Linux Forum. Or write to Evan directly at evan@starnix.com.

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