[9fans] re: license terms?

[Anssi Porttikivi porttikivi@dlc.fi]

I guess the question is, what is the business model going to be. If you
("the company") believe you can't make money selling an operating system,
then don't. But I guess you want to sell something! The license will have to
reflect that decision. I understand perfectly, that the management doesn't
like the attitude that you will just give the source code away and pray that
the magic of the free software movement brings back glory and money.

You could try selling the OS. There's must be more to the world of OS' than
Microsoft, proprietary Unix clones, free Unix clones and obscure niche OS'
by unknown companies. Personally I believe there is a market for a
well-branded, technologically advanced ("smaller, faster, more versatile,
more reliable than both Windows and Linux") general purpose OS marketed by a
well known big company.

All it needs is a full application suite to get it started and some
marketing. OS is like a language, nobody likes it unless it has a living
culture of users (=applications) around it.

I think the best license choice would be to distribute a shareware version
for a registration fee. Then you could sell various "professional" editions
with a higher price through various channels. Most of the source could be
made open, but not necessarily all has to. One interesting source code
licensing mode is the one used by Troll Tech which makes the Qt toolkit
which is used in Linux KDE environment: you can use the code freely in free
products, but it costs to use it in commercial software.