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SCO Makes Open Source Contributions
Ethanol writes: "SCO announced this morning that they're releasing cscope (a really, really sharp development tool for large C/C++ projects) and will soon release fur (a profiling/analysis/reordering tool for relocatable binaries that can speed up execution times quite a bit) under the BSD license. See their press release for details. "
One of the big things Open Source advocates have been asking companies to do is BSD or GPL applications that they plan to drop support for. If they no longer plan to profit off them, why not allow the users to keep, maintain, and improve them. The real answer is the upgrade treadmill, but no need to discuss that.
I am not terribly familiar with this product, but obviously this is a good thing, you can learn something from any sample of code.
What I wonder, is when companies release their source code like this, how much do users pick it up, redistribute, etc.? I mean, Darwin and Mozilla looked dead for a while, but then they picked open some help (I know Mozilla did, did Darwin?). Mozilla and Darwin were HUGE projects, it makes sense that users took a while to jump in there. On the otherhand, will a project like this be picked up and improved by proponents of open source, or will we just say, "finally, they get it" take their software and run?
I mean, the idea is, according to RMS, we have a fundamental right to copy digital data, and that licenses that prohibit this are fundamentally immoral, so he'll write a free OS that we can copy.
The Linux community says, we'll work with corporate interests, because they can sell support. We'll help improve the product, and you can sell support for it and make lots of money.
Now, is the latter true? Are we helping the companies that are releasing their source code with the promise that we will help, or are we grabbing their code and adding the useful bits into our pet GPL projects?
Alex