Do you really believe in FREE SOFTWARE ?

[MAHER]

Hello everybody

Without any introductions I'm going directlyto the topic.
I'm a BCA || student and the people who join BCA degree will graduate
as programmers in the first place. As you know when you want to do a
project it takes so much of effort and time especially if the project
you want to do is little bit complex. then after maybe weeks or months
of hard working the result is a brilliant product.

So after this, will you give your effort [the source code] to other
people under the name of FREE SOFTWARE.

as a programmer i may like your product and if you gave me the code
along with it i may change some features and add others from mine.
then change the color, the copy rights, and the result in one night
i'll sell your product under my name !!

so DO YOU STILL BELIEVE IN FREE SOFTWARE?

[VIGNESH PRABHU]

Hi,

Good to see someone using this mailing list. From your mail, I could pick out two questions for which you are looking for answers.
1) Why should I make my software which I have developed with lots of hard work as FOSS?
2) How do I protect my FOSS software from others who will try to make it proprietary?
I will try to answer these two questions below. Hope it will bring some clarity. Feel free to criticize it if it does not satisfy you.

1) Why should I make my software which I have developed with lots of hard work as FOSS?
A very common misconception amongst people regarding FOSS is that there is no money involved in developing a FOSS software. This is not true. There is a business model based on FOSS which does not depend on licensing fees but on support fees. By releasing your software as FOSS, you can still ask your users to pay you if they need regular support from your side while using the software. If the software you develop actually solves industry needs, then the industry will not hesitate to pay the support fees that you will charge. A very good example for this is Canonical which develops and maintains Ubuntu, a very popular linux based distribution.
By releasing your software as FOSS, you allow the users to test it for themselves and give you feedback. Also the users can contribute back to the software and help you in its development. As in case of Canonical, there is huge user base who actually see to it that all the newly released packages are available in Ubuntu compatible .deb format so that others can install it directly from repository.

2) How do I protect my FOSS software from others who will try to make it proprietary?
Once you have decided on releasing your software as FOSS, you will have to decide the conditions in which you will want your user to use your software. The easiest and simplest way is to release it under the popular GNU GPLv3 license which ensures that if anybody is using your software, then he should also release any modification done to it under the same license. This ensures that you also benefit from modification done by others. This way the whole community around the software will grow. A popular example for this is Perl scripting language, which has thousands of modules released under the same license as the programming language itself.



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[MAHER]

Well that's fine

but i'm not talking about an operating system. no one will have the
patient to modify an operating system. i'm giving an example like
players or any other useful utility. even if the software is under GNU
GPLv3 licence this is not enough. if i changed the graphics along
with some features and the name, no one will know that this software
is originally belong to Chandan ( for example).

from my view it depends on the time when you decide to make the
project. if you are thinking to make it as a free source code and
everyone can contribute that's OK, but if you are thinking about money
benefit i don't think you'll provide the code

and
about me even now when i get a tiny idea and spend so much time to
implement it, if my friends ask for the code to study it or try it by
them selves i will give them with the feeling of some sensitivity ,
what about if i made a powerful utility !!!

[Chandan Gupta]

On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 12:16 PM, MAHER <maher...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Well that's fine

but i'm not talking about an operating system. no one will have the
patient to modify an operating system.

 well an operating system doesn't belong to a single guy. its a bunch of guy. even a single kernel is built by bunch of engineers. so a single guy can't take the patient of course unless you are have bought all of them who worked on it and named your operation system on your name like windows. but then who has worked will not get their name rather than only who paid all those engineers.

i'm giving an example like
players or any other useful utility. even if the software is under GNU
GPLv3  licence this is not enough. if i changed the graphics along
with some features and the name, no one will know that this software
is originally belong to Chandan ( for example).

no its the way you said it. when we develop something in foss community, even you make a single patch it will be named after you ( for that particular patch). so a particular software belongs to all those who have contributed to the code including who have written the wiki page of it. and if you manage to do it all by alone then of course that belongs to you and you can keep it under whichever license you want it to depending upon either you want to earn from your s/w or you just want to give it for free. In either case showing your code doesn't effect you.

from my view it depends on the time when you decide to make the
project. if you are thinking to make it as a free source code and
everyone can contribute that's OK, but if you are thinking about money
benefit i don't think you'll provide the code

I explained this in above comment.

and
about me even now when i get a tiny idea and spend so much time to
implement it, if my friends ask for the code to study it or try it by
them selves i will give them with the feeling of some sensitivity ,
what about if i made a powerful utility !!!

well if you have a selfish feeling that ONLY YOU want to develop this powerful utility and nobody else and finally you want to earn from it then you should be talented enough to do that. but if you seek help for it and you are free to open it for everybody then theres foss community waiting for you to help and join. in that way your s/w is going to be MUCH MORE POWERFUL than you have ever thought because there will be a combined effort of developing the s/w.

please correct me if I have made wrong comments.
and I hope you are getting my point. Reply with any type of further clearance.

( sorry for double reply. before completing reply i accidentaly clicked reply :P )