Hello Adrian, hello forum members,
here are some background and answers to your questions:
hermocom does not violate the GPL. hermocom actually supports the GPL's deeper sense by supporting the developers. Source code is delivered to anyone buying the system.
To Adrian: if you feel that anything has to be clarified between both of us, we should do so immediately (maybe via PM - please feel free to contact me at any time). What I really do not want is to have any disagreements about your great work on pdaXrom and the ways of usage of that work.
weeXpc was born from the ideas I had to make pdaXrom fit my own needs. I realized that a lot of people have similar needs (especially those who are used to use the good old MS-DOS-based HP 200LX palmtop). So, besides making pdaXrom fit my own needs, I spent a lot of time making it more failsafe, providing routines for all kinds of tasks to make usage as simple and intuitive as possible, to make the system as user-friendly as possible.
weeXpc is meant to make pdaXrom available to professionals who may not have the time, interest and/or skills to tweak the system themselves.
pdaXrom simply needs a lot of tweaking after a plain install, in order to get a system which is suitable for daily work. And many people who need a work horse are people who won't tweak pdaXrom for the above reasons.
So I have done that work in advance for these people, with the help of some other people here, besides the pdaXrom team mostly Meanie probably, and with the help of some application developers who are not participating here in the forums.
Hence I return a lot of results from the work on weeXpc to the community - as Meanie says - that is, software packages, ideas to improve the functionality of pdaXrom etc. Many discussions I raised about missing features or suboptimal behavior of the system actually resulted in something very valuable, available for every forum member.
This is the natural, community-based way of improving software like this, and I have no problem sharing all the ideas included in weeXpc with you (you may have guessed I have such problems, because it could lower the "profit", but weeXpc is not meant for you knowledgable people here, but rather for the groups of people I mentioned above).
As for profit: Of course I, representing hermocom, must be profitable. Hence I have to charge a fee for the offer.
Market (i.e. offer and demand) determines the price, I also need to consider the amount of work I spent and still spend for this project etc.etc.
Honestly: If I would add up all the time spent so far, and substract the time spent for only the functionaly I need myself (so only considering the amount of time which I spent solely for making the system "sellable"), I would still have to charge much, much more than I do to reach the level of profit which would be needed if this was my main business. weeXpc is a spare time business of mine.
Here is where demand comes into the game. Demand is not that high, because it is a niche market. All Zaurus vendors know what I am speaking about.
It would need a very clever marketing system and much higher prices to gain a profit which can supply a living.
BTW: The price includes a lot more stuff than the software, e.g. installation service, advice in how to efficiently use the system for the individual needs, last but not least advice if weeXpc actually is the right system for the individual needs etc etc. All the pre-work which every user has to do on his own otherwise, and which takes a significant amount of time. I think it makes much sense to bundle that all and offer it to anyone.
The main idea of weeXpc was to create something which is an adequate replacement for the HP 200LX palmtop. The QTopia-based systems were not able to fulfill that, pdaXrom was the best choice for that goal. Most people who are interested in or buy weeXpc are indeed former HP 200LX users and are amazed by the system. However, many people are not willing to donate on a voluntary basis, so I think it is a good way of returning something to the original developers by using a part of the price for donations.
Now you may ask "why didn't I get any donation yet?". There are quite some developers involved, and I gave a larger donation to another developer in advance (Notecase, also a project which all pdaXrom users can have an advantage of, because Notecase is now heavily optimized for Zaurus usage and much improved for all platforms it is available for). Once I have sold the amount of weeXpc systems needed to cover this, pdaXrom project will be the next "target" for donations.
Adrian, if you like to have a control for this, please contact me privately and we will find a way.
It is clear to me that once commerce is introduced into an otherwise completely free and community-based project, people may smell a rat due to potential moral problems and license violations. For these reasons, but in the first place for reasons of common sense and human ways of thinking, I decided for that donation scheme.
Adrian, your work, and the work of the other pdaXrom developers, is very much appreciated and certainly should never be abused. If you feel that weeXpc is a form of abuse, please let me know! The idea was not to abuse it, but to make it available to a broader range of people and, in turn, give some special group of people a device with really powerful software.
I admit that I should have contacted you in advance to clarify things. I am very sorry for not having done it! I should have guessed that this may offend you, even more while not knowing any details and background.
Adrian, of course GPL allows you to use any enhancements I have done in pdaXrom. I actually hope that you will do so, making pdaXrom an even more robust and productive system. If you search my forum posts, you will find a lot of things which may or may not fit your idea of how pdaXrom should behave.
I hope I could clarify the questions so far.
If you have more questions, please ask publicly or via PM.
Best regards
Daniel Hertrich,
hermocom
