RE: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Take up?
What is the general feeling about non-gpl software for Linux?
Our software is written in C++ and as I understand it, not being a
It vary's greatly, there are GPL purists such as Stallman who want everything to be free and pragmatists who belive a person should be able to use any license they want and rate the program in accordance with what it provides rather than the licence it is under, the perfect example would be the bitkeeper cvs system used for kernel development. programmer, it
could be re-compiled (with some effort) but we're never going to be giving it away.
Depends very much on the compiler that was used and whether or not it supports cross compilation. Unsurprisingly visual C++ is rather poor in this regard whereas gcc excells. And then you have the issues of the licences of any libraries that were used. If the code followed the C99 standards pretty closely and the coders wrote for flexibility, then there shouldnt be too much of a problem in porting it.
Our business model is we sell software (and CNC machines) then provide free tech support, sometimes for decades. Changing to free software and expensive support would seriously upset our established customers. School budgets being the strange things they are you could almost guarantee that when something goes wrong, or new, in-experienced staff arrive and need help, there is nothing in the 'support' budget. Our way means that once the budget has been approved and the software and kit bought, that's it. It may be old-fashioned but it works for us, and seems to suit our customers.
The GPL is essentially a defensive license designed to make people play fair, but there are many other open or at least free licenses such as alladin that restrict the use of the software in certain enviroments. What you should be asking is what benefits would you gain from opening up the software, do you make money from CNC machines and the Software or CNC machines as well as software; does the software have any use outside of driving your machines; do you think that its release will develop into an active community that will add value to your primary product of CNC machines and so on. As for takeup in education, universities have been using unicies from the year dot, for example the Bill Gates building at cambridge dual boots with red hat and every computer science department will be using it to teach operating systems, most CS freshers dual boot their machines and by second year will ahve likely migrated. Polytechnics are likely to be a different story, as are the non technical university departments. Regards, Ben
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Ben Higginbottom