Caldera’s Ramsom Love defends his firm’s decision to charge for
Linux on a per-seat basis, and he reaffirms his opinion that the
GPL isn’t that good for business.
“Ransom Love, chief executive of Caldera International,
caused a stir recently when he said he was sympathetic to
Microsoft’s view that the GNU General Public Licence that governs
much open source development restricts business growth. In an
interview with IT Week, Love said that although some stories that
reported his remarks were incorrect, he still believed that more
flexible licence models were needed for companies to grow and
compete for enterprise business.”“‘We will give technology back to GNU, but being able to charge
is the only way to get Linux into the enterprise back office,’ Love
said. “Freedom without any control is not good. The constitution
gave the U.S. balance and it prospered -Â we need to do
that with open source and have some guidelines. GNU was never
designed to be a business model, just a development model.'”