Re: [tlug] GPL vs. paid version and ethics

[Edmund Edgar <lists@example.com>]

On 5 August 2012 12:07, Darren Cook <darren@example.com> wrote:
> But I also wondered about the ethics. If I added that feature I cut into
> their sales. Financing for the product goes down. Product quality goes
> down. Well, in, one scenario.

Your thing might be better than theirs, in which case product quality
will go up.

I think it's quite hard to call what the effect on the ecosystem of
this sort of thing is going to be; Long-term an active developer
community provides quite a big potential upside. I think the ethical
thing to do here is to build and share whatever you feel like building
and let them work out their business model around you.

That said, it would be worth talking to them first if you were
thinking of doing it to avoid duplicating effort unnecessarily - you
might be able to persuade them to bring the feature you want into
their Open Core, while you build something else that isn't in there
yet...

-- 
Edmund Edgar
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