Dalla mailing list di ethereal una simpatica discussione sul modello di
businnes del software libero
> Oggetto: Re: [Ethereal-users] Questions
>
> Sungchan Choi wrote:
>
> > Thanks for providing the free ethereal software. It's very
> useful in
> > developing protocol analysis tool and I have a question
> regarding your
> > business model. You supply your product for free, then from
> what you
> > get profit?
>
> For most of us, from nowhere. :-)
>
> As with GCC, the Linux kernel, {Free,Net,Open,Dragonfly}BSD,
> GNOME, KDE, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, etc., the
> software isn't sold, so there's no profit.
>
> The development for free software is "paid for" in various ways.
>
> Some companies exist that accept contracts to develop new
> features or other improvements to free software, and
> contribute the results of their development to the free
> software project. They might, in some cases, provide the
> results to their customers immediately, and contribute the
> results to the project some amount of time later, so their
> customers get "early access" - if the customers don't then
> supply the software in binary form to others without allowing
> those others to give the results away or to get the source
> code to the changes and give *those* away, that doesn't
> violate the GPL. Cygnus did that for various GNU tools such
> as GCC and GDB; Red Hat, who bought Cygnus, might be doing that.
>
> Some companies exist that sell support contracts for free
> software, and provide support only to paying customers. Red
> Hat does that for Linux distributions, for example.
>
> Some companies might consider some piece of free software to
> be a "commodity" - for example, they might consider operating
> systems to be a commodity - and make their money from
> hardware or consulting, and contribute to the development of
> that free software. That might be IBM's view of Linux.
>
> Some companies might use a tool and add capabilities to it
> because it helps them in their work, and consider it to be a
> good idea to contribute those additions to the free-software
> project for that tool.
> They might think that not having to maintain their changes as
> a separate version of the software, re-integrating them into
> each new release of the software, is worth letting their
> competitors have access to the changes.
>
> The Ethereal project doesn't have a business model because
> it's not a business. (Ethereal has a .com domain because
> ethereal.org wasn't available - somebody else had it.)
>
> There is at least one company providing support, training,
> and custom development for Ethereal:
>
> http://www.etherealsoft.com/
>
> There are also companies that have developed new capabilities
> for Ethereal and contributed them back. I think much of the
> VoIP capabilities fall into that category, as the
> contributions often come from people with e-mail addresses in
> domains belonging to makers of telephone equipment or to
> telephone companies.
>
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