Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
And I agree Kovid would never do it. Sometimes you can tell, a developer has too much pride in his work to sell out to the monoliths.
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Even if he does, someone else might fork the last GPL version, and develop Calibre from there under a new name. If that happens, the official, now probably paid-for Calibre might find itself without any users, even though 'new' version will probably be developed more slowly.
Look at OpenOffice. At some point, when Oracle started to jack around with it, it was forked into LibreOffice, which has now become the de facto default. Even donating OpenOffice to the Apache foundation has not turned this back around. Same with (again, Oracle): MySQL. Many Linux distributions have replaced it, or are replacing their default LAMP database with MariaDB, either only retaining MySQL as an option, and sometimes even removing it.
Selling Calibre to one of the big e-book sellers is probably only good for Kovid's purse, but it would be a detriment to open source software and e-reading in general. If it wasn't for Calibre (and Alf), I would probably not even be e-reading by now, apart from the free classics.