>Hmm, you could get source to linux, and source to all common linux
>utilities, from any linux vendor for a nominal price. Heck, why pay
>full price for RedHat, when they're obligated to give you the source
>code for $6-$8 (the cost of a writable CD [...]
You're assuming labor, office space, and a source library come free.
(When I'm burning distributions, it takes me about 90 minutes to set
up and burn the first disk. That's $225 just for the time, and we've
not even gotten into wear and tear on the CD burner (I've had one go
bad after burning about 150 CDs; another I've installed at a customer
site is starting to refuse to burn CDs after it's burned about 100.
If I assume a lifespan of 125 CDs for a consumer CD burner, and
assume it takes about a hour to buy the CD burner and install it
<after scheduling downtime on the busy Ppros that the burners all
live in; another 30 minutes>, it's $6/CD for wear and tear on the
'burner. I'll need to keep copies of the sources around for every
version of the code I send out, in a pristine form so that I can
fulfill the requirement that source be available for that code; If I
write the code to tape, it's another 30 minute spooling the code back
onto a disk (a DAT tape costs about $9. I'll eat that cost if the
license holders would allow me to waive or alter the source
requirement, otherwise requesting customers will be eating the cost
of offsite storage for the sources, and the time it takes to retrieve
the tape from storage [90 minutes to get to the warehouse get a copy
of the tape, then get back to my office; if I eat the warehousing
costs, that's still another $225 that the requesting customer has to
pay.]) Don't forget to add accounting and management costs into this
if you're anything except a one-man band, and we've still not gotten
into office costs.
It certainly makes billing each customer by what it costs at that
moment to copy the sources much more appealing, but the first
person requesting sources would be most dismayed to be charged
$4000 (A PC with a CD burner, mastering software and OS installed,
labor, the cost of a CD blank, and postage) particularly when
subsequent requestors would be charged a more reasonable $500
(assuming a safe offsite source archive.)
If shipping the source on the distribution medium (the joys of
distributing software on CD; if the customer can load the program,
they can retrieve the sources) was not allowed by the GPL, boy,
there'd be a lot of unhappy customers (and vendors) out there.
____
david parsons \bi/ I love CDs; they get rid of all sorts of annoying
\/ license problems.