Re: Tools

[David Sugar]

There are ways of dealing successfully with commercial entities that may
mearly use free software licensing to seed product or play bate and switch
games.  Of course, there is always the notion of forking the "last public
version", if it comes to that.  A more effective strategy is for the
community to dilute the corporations copyright with another far more
stubborn and committed free software party (the FSF being an excellant
example of this :) through strategic contribution, thereby blocking the
corporation from changing to proprietary licenses in the future.  That
being said, one does have to choose carefully, but I do not think strong
commercial interests are automatically bad for community.

On Sun, 20 Oct 2002, Dragi Raos wrote:

> From: "Derek Neighbors" <address@hidden>
> 
> > We can agree to disagree. Strong commercial interests means no sense
> of
> > community.  (read they will screw you at first chance they have to
> make
> > money)  Generally corporations like this put out 'dead' product to
> hope
> > some one carries it, or they hope to attract folks to get them 'buy'
> > something they need that is not free.  (i.e. bait them)
> 
> > I cant speak for motivations here, not saying they have any, but on
> the
> > whole it appears that they fit the mold of those before them that have
> > operated this way.
> 
> Prolifics' motive was simply to raise visibility of their commercial
> product. I do have some insider knowledge here, but that's irrelevant.
> What counts is whether *we* (OSS community) have something to gain from
> using and developing POSSL. I think we do.
> 
> > Certainly one could take the code and make a fork and avoid many of
> the
> > worries, but that just isnt playing nice either.
> 
> POSSL already is a fork (as I mentioned, it is Panther 4.28 and
> Prolifics isn't touching it any more; the commercial product moved on -
> not in any essential way, but certainly in versions of other people's
> stuff (DBs, middleware) it supports). What I would like to see is using
> it as basis for a larger OSS tool effort - perhaps by interfacing it
> with other goodies out there.
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> Bonzi
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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