I believe Genesi give support for MorphOS for free at the moment. If it was open source, they'd get money charging for support. Thats extra revenue on top of what they currently have coming in at the moment. More profits, helathier company. How would that make them go bankrupt as someone else mentioned earlier.
Because you're still counting it as 'extra' revenue, assuming that for some bizzare reason I'd put together a whole new machine based on Genesi hardware -- which would be additional cost for me, and
totally uneeded (as this new GPL version now runs on the hardware I currently have).
Genesi currently get :
$zero for MorphOS
$299 for Pegasos
$zero for MorphOS support
Because it is currently necessary for me to buy a Pegasos board in order to run
MorphOS -- It doesn't run on other hardware.
GPLing or otherwise Open Sourcing the code will put an end to that very quickly.
If MorphOS was GPL'd (Or some other OSS licence)
Genesi would get
$zero for MorphOS
$299 for Pegasos
$100 per year for MorphOS support (Or whatever they want to charge)
You're still counting on the fact that people have to buy the hardware - which they no longer have to do.
Also, where do people currently go for support atm - boards, forums and friends.
A more realistic projection for the most of us would be:
$zero for MorphOS - it's now GPL
$zero for Pegasos - I don't need it anymore, because it runs on my existing hardware.
$zero for Support - I'll ask around to get things working, and only call support as a last resort.
From that point of view, their current business model looks a lot smarter.
Siggy.