Companies that want to make money selling software need to be more creative than they did in the
old days. While you can sell the software you create that includes GPL software, you must pass the
source code of that software forward. Of course, others can then recompile that product, basically
using your product without charge. Here are a few ways that companies are dealing with that issue:
Software subscriptions??”Red Hat, Inc. sells its Red Hat Enterprise Linux products on a
subscription basis. For a certain amount of money per year, you get binary code to run
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Linux (so you don??™t have to compile it yourself), guaranteed support, tools for tracking the
hardware and software on your computer, and access to the company??™s knowledge base.
While Red Hat??™s Fedora project includes much of the same software and is also available
in binary form, there are no guarantees associated with the software or future updates
of that software. A small office or personal user might take the risk on Fedora (which is
itself an excellent operating system), but a big company that??™s running mission-critical
applications will probably put down a few dollars for RHEL.
Donations??”Many open source projects accept donations from individuals or open source
companies that use code from their projects.
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