[Gambas-user] LICENSE FEE

[Rob]

On Saturday 23 July 2005 06:00, BUDI ARIEF GUSANDI wrote:
> I think i agree with rob, when gambas is totally mature and stable
> for real application, then a commercial license version of gambas
> should be there :-$ .

I think you have misunderstood me on a number of levels.

1. What I was describing was a commercially sold but still GPL version 
of Gambas.  Even if Benoit wanted to buy a commercial license to Qt 
and release a proprietary version of Gambas, he couldn't, because if 
your code was ever developed with the GPL version of Qt, the 
commercial license will do you no good.  (For this reason, I also 
would debate whether someone else buying a commercial license of Qt 
would be able to legally develop proprietary Gambas/Qt applications.  
I also wonder if the KBasic guy really threw out all his GPL KBasic 
code prior to buying a commercial Qt license, but that's for another 
list.)  See what Trolltech themselves have to say about that:

http://doc.trolltech.com/3.3/faq.html#4-3

2. Gambas 1.0.x is totally mature and stable enough for real 
applications, to which any number of my clients will attest.... I've 
had other things fail like CD's not automounting and network cards 
flaking out, but the Gambas apps have been rock solid since about 
version 0.80.  By the time of its release, I have every expectation 
that Gambas 2.0 will be as well.

3. What would make a commercially sold version of Gambas possible 
would be a stable Windows port that doesn't require Cygwin, since 
Linux-only software (other than distributions of Linux) has never 
done well in the shrinkwrap market.  I hope that either an IDE that 
can run under Gtk or the Windows version of Qt 4 being GPL will make 
this possible, though as I've said previously, many of the things 
that make Gambas powerful are Linux/Unix features and not Gtk or Qt 
features.

Of course, when that happens anyone can release a shrink-wrapped 
version, not just Benoit, but I'm sure we could come up with some 
"official release" graphic that we could use to indicate its proceeds 
were benefiting Gambas and not someone like 
http://www.luxuriousity.com/ .  (People like that usually rename the 
free software they're selling anyway, so people don't realize they're 
buying free software.  Check their site out, it's pretty 
hilarious/disheartening.)

Rob