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Son Of My Adventures With The GPL

Dear Readers, Last episode ended as Poingo-man stood on the precipice of a very important choice: to give up the secret code and fall in with the forces of the Open Source (motto: "May the Source be with you"), or to spring for some other method of converting to PDF while jealously guarding the source, in the interest of capitalism and self.

All sides presented negative arguments. If Poingo-man gave up the source, zillions of Open-Sourcers could turn out trillions of uncontrolled copies of Email-Printer with nary a nickle tickling Poingo-mans pocket.

Or, Poingo-man could keep Email-Printer private, but have the user separately download Ghostscript, as is done in some other similar apps. Within the GPL, but chintzy.

 
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Or, Poingo-man could say he was going open source, but in reality put out faulty code which would prevent "unauthorized" dissemination. A sure way to bring down the wrath of the warlord GNU.

Or Poingo-man could actually pay retail to have a really smart developer create his own path to the holy PDF, but hey, that costs bucks. Anyone who develops and markets new software knows that the need for bucks is a swirling vacuum which would put Hoover to shame.

The golden revelation came from a conversation with Miles Jones, president of Artifex Software Inc. who oversees the commercial licensing of freely-available Ghostscript. I observed that there are different demographics would want the executable as opposed to the source.

The Open Source dudes would probably never pay for Email-Printer anyway, whereas the "I need the function" folks would never take the time or effort to compile. Miles agreed, and he is a guy who should know.

 
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Further. allowing the source to spread could create opportunities for the Open-Source folks to be exposed to other Poingo offerings, which are priced so competetively that even they might buy something, but further, the spread of the source could prompt a corporate deal which could actually be profitable.

So Poingo-man decided, purely for business reasons, to go open source with Poingo Email Printer. The source code is freely available at www.poingo.com. When you get there, feel free to have a look around.

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