macrealist's Journal: Why GPL licence won't work

how does a purly consumer product, say games, benefit from such a model? Would extremly talented unpaid groups of artists and programmers volunteer to create high quality games? It's not going to happen. Consumers are going to ALWAYS have to pay for high quality games. Consumers, as an aggregate, will have X amount to spend on games - and companies will be fighting to get that money. For those companies that are fighting for that money, GPL'd source is not a viable solution. ie, why would company A spend money to develop a cool game if it knew it could just wait till company B is done and releases its source? As a result, company A would need to earn far less money to cover its costs, so it could charge far less for the same thing -- company B, the innovators, are forced out of the market.

Take that same train of thought, and now apply it to a group of small businesses. There is software that small businesses need that is unique and would not be provided by the open software being created by big businesses. Who creates this? You're not going to get much of a consultant for that $200 bucks you want to spend on dental imagery software...

Now apply the model to medium sized business ...