wxPython Licence vs GPL

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 26 Nov 2005 09:54:24 -0800, Alex Martelli wrote:

>> My understanding is that both Oracle and SAP make most of their money
>> through consulting and customization rather than licencing or sales. I
> 
> Have you checked their quarterly statements recently?  

Obviously not.

Thanks for going beyond the call of duty to research the facts in such
detail. I'm surprised that Adobe is selling so many licences -- I don't
know anyone who has paid for Adobe software in many years -- and you can
take that any way you like. (Kids! Pirating software is stealing!!!) 

I can't argue with anything you've written, except to say that we've
obviously got different ideas of what consists of software sales.

I know that there is a general sense of "sales" that effectively means
"any source of income from services or goods". There is also a more
restrictive (there's that word again...) sense of a sale being a transfer
of ownership. In that stricter sense, nobody sells software -- they
merely licence it.

The sense of "software sales" I mean is intermediate between the two. The
way I mean "sales", when Joe Public goes to acmesoft.com, pays $99 on his
credit card number to download Acmesoft FooMaker, that's a sale. When he
discovers that he also needs 37 Client Access Licences at $19 each, that's
_not_ a software sale, and neither is the $150 per year for support and
upgrades: that's revenue from licencing, not sales.

You're usage of sales may differ, and I'm not going to argue that one is
better than the other. By my meaning, Red Hat doesn't sell RH Enterprise
Linux, but charges for support. By your meaning, Red Hat does sell RHEL.
I'm good with that definition too, so long as we can agree on one or the
other.


-- 
Steven.