[MUD-Dev] Libs for 3D Client/Servers

[Adam Martin]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alistair Milne" <krug at krug.org.uk>
To: "mud-dev" <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 10:35 AM
Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Libs for 3D Client/Servers

> On Tue, 3 Jul 2001, Travis Casey wrote:

>> This is the only part that wouldn't work under the GPL.  You
>> could sell copies of the base client, but you wouldn't be able to
>> prevent forks.  (And there wouldn't be much reason for people to
>> buy your base client... once someone out there had a copy, they
>> could give it away to others.)

> Assuming the client is completely open source and copylefted and
> is freely downloadable, there are still ways to make money, for
> example printed manuals and disks.  Don't underestimate the desire
> for people to need a physical thing in their hand when they buy
> software.  Reasons can vary from habit, to lack of download
> bandwidth, to wanting a real manual to thumb through.  It
> certainly accounts for a sizeable chunk of the Linux vendors'
> incomes.  

There certainly are still ways to make money, but then there always
are; its just that the more you make free, the smaller the amount of
money you can make in comparison. In your example of the linux
vendors, they have incomes that are pocket money compared to what
you would expect to make from selling an OS.

This is a problem when you need to show a certain revenue (e.g. to
balance a irreducible expenditure on e.g. network bandwidth and
server maintainence), or when you are starting small and need to
grow revenue quickly in order to stay solvent.

Adam M

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