"Free software" et gratuité.

Voici un texte de Bruce Perens, qui apporte de l'eau à mon moulin.

Où la gratuité intégrale devient un facteur pour choisir entre plusieurs
solutions libres.
Inutile de dire que les conceptions ici développées par Bruce Perens
sont aux antipodes de celles développées par Stéphane.


We held about a week of discussion on the GUI issue, on the UserLinux
mailing list - about 200 postings. It drowned out all other work. It was
clear from the discussion that while GNOME and KDE each exceed the other
in some areas, when you weigh them all together they are of equal
technical merit. However there is a critical business difference between
the two GUIs: GNOME does not require a royalty in connection with
proprietary software development based upon their SDK. Qt, the widget
set upon which KDE is based, does have a proprietary developer licensing
fee connected with it.

It's important for us to get more Free Software into business, so that
businesses will be sympathetic with us when we need to ask for
legislative changes to support the long-term viability of Free Software.
You know the issues: software patents, DRM, etc. Today these are seen as
business vs. fringe-party issues, and we're on the losing side. The
extent to which our software penetrates the business world will govern
our effectiveness in getting the legislative changes we need.

Enterprise users buy solutions, not systems. And it's a fact of life
that enterprise customers will want to run a mixed Free + proprietary
environment, choosing whatever software is best for a particular
application. The overall viability of UserLinux will be based upon the
size and quality of the ecosystem of solutions around it, both Free and
proprietary. So, in order to get any Free Software into businesses, our
Free system must promote the creation of a large collection of
proprietary solutions that do not exist today. As we penetrate the
enterprise, we will continue to move Free Software higher up the
application stack, until these businesses make use of Free Software
predominantly. But you need proprietary software to get in the door.

It is possible for us to make our system entirely royalty-free for
solution developers, both Free and proprietary. This dictates some
software choices: GNOME and PostgreSQL rather than KDE and MySQL, simply
because of the way those products license proprietary developers. This
will support a large ecosystem of both Free and proprietary solution
developers by lowering the financial barriers to entry all the way to
zero. This will be especially important in third-world countries, where
the expense of an SDK license is much more significant than to a
developer in the US or Europe.


--

Michel TALON