MS vs Open Source link

[Vic Cekvenich <vc...@basebeans.com>]

Overall a good article.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-985221.html?tag=fd_top

The scary thing is I have heard clients that they think that if they use 
any open source... now their software is open source or in a conflict 
with comerical software they are using.

.V



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Re: MS vs Open Source link

[Jeffrey Dever <js...@sympatico.ca>]

>
> A good way to handle this is to take the Apache projects, name them 
> something different, add a pretty UI and then sell them for lots of 
> money to those same customers under a more restrictive and 
> closed-source license.

I'm in contact with one company that already does this with HttpClient, 
which is of course completely fine by the license.


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Re: MS vs Open Source link

[Brian McCallister <mc...@forthillcompany.com>]

> The scary thing is I have heard clients that they think that if they 
> use any open source... now their software is open source or in a 
> conflict with comerical software they are using.
>

A good way to handle this is to take the Apache projects, name them 
something different, add a pretty UI and then sell them for lots of 
money to those same customers under a more restrictive and 
closed-source license.

Oh, wait, IBM already does this =)

(Not bashing IBM,  just making a funny - this is sorta the point of the 
Apache license)

-Brian


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Re: MS vs Open Source link

[Santiago Gala <sg...@hisitech.com>]

Henri Yandell wrote:

(...)
> As for the article itself, I think it's more the open atmosphere to
> bug-reporting that means opensource is less buggy, and the frequent
> releases, than the code itself being open. So there's no reason why closed
> source shouldn't be the same, except that they're unable to replicate the
> culture that popular open source projects have.
> 

Culture is already a big enough answer. Being impatient as I am, I find 
increasingly that culture in closed source groups, no matter how big, is 
  much less cosmopolitan than, say, Apache or Debian people. One of the 
reasons is because they cannot discuss freely (with lines of code) the 
technical problems except in a reduced population, and they tend to have 
narrow thinking.

Also, I think a key answer is about shame and pride. I have already felt 
ashamed committing very hacky code in "public" repositories due to the 
need of having it working, quick fixing, etc. In a closed source culture 
thee is no compelling reason to revisit this code, and the probability 
of somebody else fixing or refactoring it is quite small. ;-)

You have both a positive reason (being proud of your own code) and a 
negative pressure (being ashamed by other people looking at it) to 
ensure highr quality of initial Open Source contributions. On top of 
this, you have a feed back process to fix problems. So, I won't be 
marvelled if the results are (asymptotically) perfect.

Regards,
      Santiago


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Re: MS vs Open Source link

[Henri Yandell <ba...@generationjava.com>]

I can understand them thinking that. I had my gut feeling on it slightly
off for a while, mainly as I was viewing one type of software.

ie) Say I grab an LGPL/GPL Java library and incorporate it into my
product, which btw I install onto client's machines via jnlp.

As I am distributing a product, I have to open source it and furthermore
GPL it.

Now, the mistake I made was to apply this example to other software which
ran only on the server, ignoring the fact that it wasn't being distributed
in this case. Still, it's a pain to have to deal with and not worth the
effort.

That's only for the viral *GPL stuff though.

As for the article itself, I think it's more the open atmosphere to
bug-reporting that means opensource is less buggy, and the frequent
releases, than the code itself being open. So there's no reason why closed
source shouldn't be the same, except that they're unable to replicate the
culture that popular open source projects have.

Hen

On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, Vic Cekvenich wrote:

> Overall a good article.
> http://news.com.com/2100-1001-985221.html?tag=fd_top
>
> The scary thing is I have heard clients that they think that if they use
> any open source... now their software is open source or in a conflict
> with comerical software they are using.
>
> .V
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscribe@jakarta.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: general-help@jakarta.apache.org
>
>


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