Oren Held wrote:
> No. I just wonder who's salary is actually based on his GPL code work.
Does LGPL work count?
>
> I don't argue the GNU ideology now, I just believe that PRACTICALLY
> there are no "software houses" (or individual programmers) in Israel
> which produce GPL software as their main business, and which survive
> and succeed for more than 5 years.
>
Define "main business"?
I have produced, both myself and as part of Lingnu, several pieces of
code over the past four and a half years (I've started freelancing in
February 2003), and have been deriving my livelihood from mostly-GPL
code. Does that qualify?
> This reason or another, I'm just saying that it doesn't work *here* as
> a salary-source. In Europe & USA there are few cool GPL-code-based
> companies like TrollTech, MySQL. (I don't refer to RH & SuSE as
> GPL-code-writers as main business)
I'll add CodeWeavers. In a way, what CodeWeavers are doing is truly the
open source model. While TrollTech and MySQL both make their income from
selling proprietary licenses to GPL code in something which is
borderline extortion, CodeWeavers makes no claims in trying to make it
sound it is illegal not to use their product. In that sense, what they
are selling is 100% name and support.
>
> An Israeli example for a GPL-related-software-company that I know is
> Zend ("The PHP Company").
PHP is not GPL. It's based on a non-copyleft license. I'm taking it to
mean that you meant "open source" rather than "GPL" in your previous
statement.
> Zend produces proprietary software such as various PHP-helper-tools -
> as their main business.
It's an interesting question whether that last statement is relevant to
your assertion. If they have, say, five programmers working on the PHP
engine itself, and getting paid to do so by Zend, wouldn't that be,
under your terms, "getting their salary from open source work"?
>
> - Oren
>
Shachar
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