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

[Rob]

On Monday 27 June 2005 03:04, Eilert wrote:
> > 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 :-)

By making it into a business.  I spend virtually all of my 
professional life either modifying existing GPL-covered code to my 
clients' liking, or writing new code which I always license under the 
GPL.  My company bills by the hour, not by the copy as proprietary 
software developers do.  Because the code is GPL, I get to reuse as 
much as I want from project to project, resulting in similar cost 
efficiencies to the "write once, sell to many" model and in 
competitive rates for my clients, and I'm not stuck trying to force 
my clients' business models to fit my choices of user interface, file 
formats, workflow, etc.

No one says you have to put your GPL'ed code on the net for all 
comers, just that you have to give the source code to whomever gets 
the binary.  Sure, my clients could pass the code on to other people 
who could use it.... that is, their competitors.  On the other hand, 
why would they do that?

> 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...)

And this is largely why I don't make much of the GPL'ed code public 
that I write for my clients.  (I hope to release the time-lapse movie 
editor I've been working on for one of them.... written in Gambas, 
but also uses mplayer and other tools on the back end.)

Rob