I know a bit about coding, and have experience in developing in various languages, mainly on the windows platform.  However, for the last 4 to 5 years I have thrown away windows and although my day job is still windows programming have started looking at doing cross platform / linux development.

Previously, on windows I have written a few applications that I have managed to sell over the years, Creditz, P900Themer, Unique, etc and although I am starting to cross into the benefits of open source and developing on an opensource os, I still would like to sell the applications as well.  Here in lies a problem as I transition from the windows proprietary way of thinking of things to the open source world.  What I really want to do at this point is write a cross platform application, which is free on the linux platforms, as I want to add benefit to the OS and give back to the community, but for a windows / mac version of the application I would like to sell it.

Why would I want to sell it on windows / mac ? Well I know that it’s not really opensource thinking, but I still feel I need some financial gain for my investment in time.  I have a family, a day job and my time is valuable to me.  So why sell to windows and mac users ?  Well they are used to paying for their applications for a start, the proprietary OS vendors make money from them so why shouldn’t I ?  So why not sell it on linux as well, surely if the app is that good people will buy it?  Well, I don’t want to charge on linux as I want to give something back.

I’m in this midpoint in thinking and it’s not a good place to be.

The logistics of trying to achieve this goal is not a simple matter.  Putting aside the actual development language and environment, any open source application I do write therefore requires me to open source my code.  So what is to stop someone taking the code I have just given to the community and compiling on the windows and mac target platforms ? Nothing.

Maybe I could release the code under the LLPL, Lummie Linux Public License, that allows the source to be compiled and distributed on Linux OSs but not on windows and the Mac….! Now there’s a thought, but some how I don’t think that this would be compatible with the GPL.

So it seems to me, to meet my requirements that I would have to keep the source closed, which allows me to sell the windows and mac versions and provide a free download of the linux version in a compiled form only.  This does mean that I must be thorough to ensure that no GPL’ed code or libraries are used in my application, but under this circumstance I would be able to at least contribute a hopefully useful application to the linux community for free.

I guess you may feel that I haven’t grasped the whole point of open source and free software, and it would be more beneficial to the community to fully gpl my code and make my money by providing support or services around the application, but I can’t seem to fit this model into my plans at this point.

So am I missing something ? Do I talk the open source talk but not do the walk ?  Is a “Licensed for Linux” license a good idea and could it be enforced? Flame away below….

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