Developing Commercial GPL Code and Plugins

[Ned Storm]

A problem for us programmers that are self employed is how to get paid for all our hard work in the face of coders that are salaried employees of large companies and they get satisfaction out of promoting free software.

But they are paid to develop paid software and on the other hand fiercely support free software.

I don't know what I would do with these guys if I was an employer and discovered their philosophy and thought about how their attitude might be impacting on my business.

Of course, anyone can do what they like in their own time and give away their code for free via open source or whatever means they please.

What I am proposing here is a way for us entrepreneurial programmers to put food on the tables for our family members.

Since the GPL crowd want to take over the world with scripts for blogging, CMS and Forums, I think the way forward for us guys that need to generate life-sustaining income for our work is to split our software in 2 parts.

Part 1 is GPL and is completely open source but is devoid of comments and uses random names for functions and variables so it is hard for people to rip off or understand our code.

Part 2 is the user-friendly interface/admin area that has no interaction with the GPL code. Also, this code is unfriendly to anyone trying to produce a derivative work for free.

So my ideas may be a framework for us coders that are not employed in the software industry and are trying to make a living by selling the code that we did a lot of work to create. And we don't want community involvement to produce a never-ending series of code releases. We just write a script with a few tweaks to iron out the bugs and that is that.

What do you think about this? ...