Re: GPL
Everett Williams wrote:
> Had [Linus Torvalds] fanatically defended his "genius"
> work and kept total control of all aspects, how many of
> us would know who he is today?
From what I've read, Linus still has tight control over the core. But I
understand your point. You don't see Minix making waves on the OS scene
these days, because the author chose to retain complete control.
On the other hand, Linus isn't making money *directly* from the sale of
Linux - that's being done by Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Caldera... But even
there, the sustainablity of their business model is in doubt.
In 'The Magic Cauldron', Eric Raymond makes the point that there are two
distinct valuations of software: use value, and sale value. He points out
the obvious - sale value is threatened by the shift from closed to open
source. Since RDS makes money on the sale value of Euphoria, I don't see any
incentive for RDS to make the code open source.
I think a good parallel to Euphoria is QBasic. Like Euphoria, the
'interpreted' version was free, while the 'compiled' version cost money.
There were a number of features that the interpreted version lacked, (such
as mouse support), but clever coders soon figured ways around that. Not
being open source didn't seem to hurt QBasic.
If I were RDS, I'd build a 'lite' version of Euphoria that included an IDE
(like EE, hint hint) and include files already built in. That way, the
entire development package would fit on a single .EXE file, just like
QBasic.
-- David Cuny
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