[Gambas-user] Re: Licence program writed in Gambas.

[Eilert]

Hi Rob,

I'm just curious:

> I have made tens of thousands of dollars writing GPL software, maybe 
> even hundreds of thousands after so long; I do it almost full-time, 
> and I think it's safe to say it's my living.

How do you do that? I'm just an amateur programmer, coding a few tools 
for my own and my family's firms. But I'm at a lack to understand how to 
make money with programs you just give away :-)

To make that clear: I'm absolutely in favour of Open Source, and I've 
read about many people who say just the same as you do - but never found 
any description of what the actual source of income would be then.

> Having previously worked for a company that was so paranoid about 
> piracy that I ended up spending more time developing features to lock 
> code to particular clients' computers and prevent them from giving it 
> to their competition (like they actually would) than developing the 
> actual code itself, I'm very happy with how things have turned out so 
> far.  Gambas has only made me more efficient, and I suspect that as 
> it becomes more popular there'll be a huge pool of Gambas code that 
> new people can draw from in a way that's not available to, for 
> example, VB users.

This is why I love Gambas and why I'm currently re-programming 
everything for my firm from VB into Gambas. I'm almost there, I would 
say, the main apps are already up and running fine, with only a few 
major and minor function still missing.

So I've been thinking about publishing the whole stuff within the Gambas 
universe to maybe just help others or discuss any items with it. (My 
only problem is that these apps work with a lot of files, data and stuff 
with personal data of customers included which I cannot publish - and 
they won't run without these data...)

But if I really intended to make money with these programs I wouldn't 
have any idea how to achieve that.

Rolf