Firefox market share bounces back 6719

OK, that is more clear to me. I would buttert, however, that the *payment* you make for GPL software is agreeing to abide by the license. That might be too steep for some people... fine, just choose something else then. This may close off an avenue for commercial benefit, but it also has the benefit of reducing fragmentation of the code base and ensuring a free, open, and ubiquitous platform.

And recall that you can still sell closed source components that ride on GPL infrastructure, so this opens up a wide field for commercial innovation. You can even use most open source tools and libraries to make closed source applications. Linux, Apache, perl, python, PHP, JBoss, SDL, MySQL, Mesa, ... I've lost count of the open source components I've used when crafting solutions I sell to my customers, including solutions that are mbutt produced and sold as a bundled product. One client even found it worth while to modify an open source product and release the changes back to the community (check out embedded Mesa to see the fruits of that effort).

Mesa is a good example actually. It was written by an old college friend of mine. He wrote it while working on his Master's degree at UW Madison and released it for free. He is now a founding partner in a company that specializes in customizing and extending that software. If he had not released Mesa as open source, it is unlikely it would have become popular enough to provide that opportunity.

So, yes, there are trade-offs in adopting the GPL and similar open source licenses, but increasingly developers are finding it worth while.

Thad