How To Do Pure GPLv3 Business
Wow. The Gnash project continues to be a living example of how business is done with a pure GPL model!
John Gilmore explains how it works to a software developer company who wanted to use Adobe Flash and was simple told “No, we don’t want your money” - lol
This is the classic “free software support / development” business contract, as practiced for many years by Cygnus Support (which I founded, and where Rob was a key employee). The key to making it work is for both parties to understand what exact specs you require the free product to meet. Then the developers can work up a price for which they think they can do that work. If that price is within your budget, you conclude a contract; otherwise, you and they start shifting the specs, to see if you can come up with a subset that you can live with, which is also cheap enough to implement.
If your spec is “perfectly implements every possible Flash 9 movie” then it’ll be expensive — multiple years of work by at least three or four talented programmers. If your spec is “plays the ten Flash 9 movies that we ourselves are authoring” then there’s a lot more leeway for adjustment — small changes in those movies can probably make large improvements in the delivery time and cheapness of the player. If your spec is “plays Youtube and nine other Flash 9 sites of our choosing”, then not only is this a development contract, but it should also include a post-delivery support contract (because those sites sometimes change their flash movies, and you’ll want Gnash to improve to play those websites as they evolve, after your product’s first release).
One area that would speed up development is if you could make good, small test cases. If you find a flash movie that fails in gnash, simplify it down to the essential part that fails, and report that. Ideally that test case would be your original work under copyright law, so you could assign it to the FSF and it could be added to Gnash’s regression test suite. Then not only can a developer fix the issue, and know when they’ve fixed it, but every future developer will find out rapidly if they have broken it in making some later change.
2. What kind of monetary investment would be necessary to significantly speed up Gnash development? I realize that this may be a difficult question to answer, but we are quite serious. We were prepared to pay Adobe to license their player,I am happy that Adobe keeps declining to serve significant parts of the market; it makes life easier for the free software competition. I’m sorry it makes your life harder, though.
Most businesses don’t want a “significant speedup”; they want a “product in which these features work by this deadline”. If that’s what you really want, please give Rob an idea of which particular features, and a vague idea of the deadline.
The How To Do Pure GPLv3 Business by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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