[Gambas-user] LICENSE FEE

[Rob]

On Saturday 23 July 2005 21:22, Szilard wrote:
> You are all welcome to donate via Paypal, instead of asking for a
> shrinkwrap. It's plain and clear right in your face on the front
> page. If you're using it in a commercial environment and derive a

My desire for a shrinkwrapped Gambas isn't because I feel that I'm 
personally not contributing enough to Gambas.  It's not even that I 
think Gambas needs to be monetized, though I think Benoit deserves 
everything he eventually gets out of it.  My desire for a 
shrinkwrapped Gambas (as well as a Windows version of Gambas) stems 
from my desire to have Gambas be the first thing people think of when 
they want to learn how to program, rather than VB.NET, Java or even 
Javascript.

By the time you see the Paypal link, you're already on the Gambas 
homepage.  On the other hand, if you're walking through Staples and 
see Gambas sitting there next to VB and the other development tools, 
even if you don't buy it that day you might look it up on the net and 
still be exposed to it.  If you're a corporate user, there's very 
often tremendous pressure to only use software that comes in a box, 
preferably with a manual though that seems to be going away in recent 
years.

In the US retail software market, shelf space gives software far more 
credibility than any advertising ever could.  I expect this is true 
to some extent in other markets as well.  I'm looking forward to the 
day when Gambas has as much mainstream appeal as OpenOffice or 
Firefox, and think it's important to have some goals in mind for that 
day.

> I agree that a Windows/Mingw/Qt4 version would be nice. You could
> probably find paying customers for writing software for Windows via
> Gambas, paying you to develop a piece of app, even if it's released
> GPL,

This is my own company's software business model in a nutshell, aside 
from the Windows thing.

Rob