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Making The GPL Easier For Companies To Swallow
stupidNewbie writes "There is a new GPL "wrapper" gaining momentum on Capitol Hill. Dubbed O-STEP, the Open Source Threshold Escrow Program allows vendors to license their products until so many millions are made, then agree to release the code under GPL. This sounds like a good bridge for companies looking to tap into the strengths of open source distribution." Starting from zero, it can certainly gain momentum quickly -- sounds like a good idea though.
I'm just worried that things will get out of hand.... how many millions are we talking before source is released?
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
I can think of a few legacy projects I'd like to see released like that - Clipper for one.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
If the money is not given by a certain date, threaten to archive the code in /dev/null. This will get people donating money desperately as to not see it go in the trash. (and if it is actually done a few times, it will seem more real)
The Open Source Threshold Escrow Program would create goodwill for software vendors trying to sell products to government agencies and large companies afraid of proprietary vendor lock-in, said Tony Stanco, creator of the program, known as O-STEP.
Here's how O-STEP would work: A vendor puts a piece of software in escrow with Stanco's Center of Open Source and Government, based at George Washington University. The company determines a sales threshold that it wants to reach before the software is released under an open source license. After it hits that threshold, the software is released as an open source product.
Great, so I want to get on the good side of the government and big companies by signing up for this license. I think I'll just set my target for $10 billion so I don't have to worry about it ever actually going open source, god forbid.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
Seems that everyones getting into the open source, wonder how long it will last.
Now I only have to wait for a couple more million copies of RedHat 8 to be sold before I get access the the source!
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
...because it seems I've seen this episode before!
Perhaps there are so many cooks in the slashdot editorial kitchen that a few dishes get made twice due to lack of communication...
Before you know it, we'll be seeing Windows GPL.
Right after the large government agencies and other software vendors succeed in getting Microsoft to play along with their demands of not illegally leveraging their monopoly.
...as long as they have figured out a way to avoid one problem: the vendor keeps adjusting the price higher so they avoid passing the threshhold.
In any case, I think we needs something like this to add some incentive to open-sourcing stuff. Not everyone likes to work for free.
One of the big strengths of Free Software is that you can leverage the community for rapid development and bugfixing. If you've already developed the code under a closed-source, proprietary model, and it's been released long enough to sell 10^6 units, then much of the development is (presumably) already done. Plus, if development was open from day 1, the final codebase would tend to be less messy and obfuscated, IMHO.
Not that I don't welcome such a "late release" model for proprietary code, just thinking out loud...
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
When a week goes by without a dupe on slashdot
go here and read about it.
The headline reads: "Iraq's New Chief? Jay Garner could soon be in charge of 23 million Iraqis."
so now we will see accounting practices where the companies trys to HIDE the profits! haha
no no no, we didn't make money at all guys! really!
(okay, so people already do this for tax purposes, but anyhow)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
This is gonan be good in theory, but just wait until someone makes it *really* big with something, and then you arent ever going to be able to find actual *revenue* charged to the product, just circumventing their responsibiility. I can think right now the money they make will be from selling 'software service' contracts and not actual software products.
I have a friend who used to (years ago) be an accountant in the record industry. Their books were set up to NEVER show a profit. It wasn't illegal, and if you didn't know about it and agreed to a percentage of profit, you were just screwed.
Unless they're very careful with wording on this, companies will just set things up so that the threshold is never reached.
If they ARE careful enough that no legal loophole is available, I suspect that companies will consider this a time bomb and avoid it anyway.
Vendors of commercial software are going to volentarily put a revenue cap on their products?
Why wouldnt they just license it with a classic commercial license?
Or are you saying you can use GPL'd code and keep it closed until they make X dollars then open it?
Can I sell my own version of closed source linux until I make 200 million dollars, then open the source?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Wouldn't freeloaders just keep on waiting till the source is released??
I am sure that with the propper acountants anyone can always break even and never make any money.
Get a free ipod.
Of course, it's possible that some organizations would just put off buying the software since they could get it for free after the expiration date. But presumably if the organizations can afford to wait that long (5-10 years, maybe?), they probably didn't really need the software in the first place.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
One can always get the Congress to bump up the thrashold for you.
This is a stupid idea!
Cool. So let's see what we've got here.
You could be cynical and say many companies will stop at step two, but then again how many of such companies would bother with this licensing scheme in the first place? Maybe opening their code will allow them to expand their customer base via support contracts to those who wouldn't purchase proprietary software.
Also, this may give consumers incentive to purchase the software in the hope that it will eventually become open. Sort of a modified contractual version of what happened with the open sourcing of Blender. Cool.
First it was "glowing cyber balls", now "Making the GPL easier to swallow"? Is slashdot trying to make troll-friendly stories?
Ron Paul 2012
Juxtaposed with the headline, that icon looks positively phallic.
Note that this has already happened for the Blender3D toolkit. Not under the O-STEP license, of course, but using a similar scheme -- raising enough funds, then open-sourcing the product.
There was also an abortive attempt for a while to open source the GoBe Productivity suite. That cost a bit too much to purchase though, apparently.
*shrug* So it can work sometimes...
-- Askari: Give JavaScript the bird.
If I need a custom solution, I'm wiling to pay the $10-$50k to have it developed. However, some systems aren't really custom and someone needs it. I'm happy to pay $700/designer for Photoshop, it's critical to their function. I'm not willing to pay $20m to get 4 licenses of Photoshop.
As a result, commercial companies can spread the development costs among EVERYONE.
In this case, let's suppose that their is a system that would benefit everyone. They sell licenses until the set profit (cost +, it's government contracts primarily), then everyone gets it.
This avoids lock in, but eliminates the open source problem. Right now either someone duplicates an existing product for the benefit of Free Software (how GNU started), or someone builds a custom solution and releases it (I'm discounting the hobbiest scratching an itch that results in thousands of MP3 players).
If government agencies began to require this for certain projects, we'd get a lot more software under the GPL.
the successful conversion of Blender from proprietary to GPL?
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
In fact, it sounds as good as it did the first time it appeared and was discussed...
5 4&mode=thread&tid=106&tid=98
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/17/12302
Oh well, that was two days ago. If you hurry, you can probably regurgitate all of the +5 comments and boost your karma.
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
hpefully this wont turn out like public domain (in a few cases), where companies are kicking and screaming to hold on to thier 'rights' when thier time is up. Think disney is/was doing this over mickey.
wow, doesnt this kind of echo how MS was saying the GPL was bad for business?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
My stuff is so Mickey-Mouse that, regardless of common sense, the intent of the framers of the Constitution, and Lawrence Lessig, I'm just going to have to buy enough legal artillery to keep it out of the public domain. ;)
The WordPerfect angle is interesting. I used to think it had some crazy keyboard gymnastics, until I tried emacs.
Props and an HB to RMS nevertheless...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
any reaction yet from Mr. Stallman? I would guess that this would not sit well, given that all software is ideally free according to the FSF (although I can see both sides...). Interesting development, either way.
And wasn't it called "copyright"?
Wouldn't shortening copyright duration in general for software be more palatable than requiring full GPLing of source?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Let's try...(Note to moderators: this is a joke!)
;) )
RMS was asked to speak at the conference but refused. Newsforge just published a statement from him explaining why. You can read it here.
This way of doing things will lose one of the benefits of going GPL from day one. Since the code will be closed source for a period you can't build on top of already open software (unless lgpl), this means having to reinvent the wheel, which means higher cost.
On the other hand if the software is open source from day one customers will be less inclined to pay, profit suffers and the software won't be made.
Would you like some egg with your chicken?
So suppose we make a more company friendly GPL? (FSF probably won't like it so a lot will have to be created from scratch, but less that for the proposed scheme), Requiering that source be disclosed after a profit threshold is reached won't work since a company could cheat by setting the threshold redicoulously high. What might work is some kind of time-delayed GPL e.g "If you modify this source and make binaries the source must be provided no later that three months later". That way the a free softwrae author can be sure that nothing based on his code will stay closed forever, and companies could benefit from already developed code. Still it would probably depend a lot on the free software community and their willingness to change their lisences, and you can bet you'll see different time limits depending on what the authour of a piece of code thinks is acceptable. But if something like this is implemented I believe both business and the community could benefit. (except for evil monopolies
This sounds so much like the argument that once a software company has made enough money on a version of software that they should/could give it away or open source it so that people who would have never bought it can benefit from it.
The part that gets me is that there has to be a "trusted entity" that ensures that the release occurs once this mysterious threshold is reached.
I think there is a great parallel here in the pharmaceutical industry. After all, we all know that drug companies don't fight for extended patent rights to drugs that improve peoples lives. They are always real nice about making their "threshold" amount then releasing their drug(s) to generic and whole-saler manufacturers so that the majority of the people can benefit.
It is not ALWAYS about money.
I've been shaking my head trying to figure-out how to accomplish something like this. O-STEP is a taking a well thought-out approach that just MIGHT work. The real problem is getting lobbying money from vendors like IBM to start pushing programs like this. We need an Open Source Lobbying Group (OSLG?). A group dedicated to raising money and pushing legitimate legislation toward balancing the playing field for companies providing Open Source products. In my eyes some of the possible legislation would include tax-exempt status for companies or portions of companies, or some of the non-profit's umbrella of protection. Grant programs are another necessary step, in my opinion. Governments needs to start paying some development costs for software its people or even companies need, and stop lining the pockets of a particular abusive monopoly power in the industry.
So, in short O-STEP is a GOOD-STEP; but more needs to be done in this arena.
People don't release code open source as some kind of embarrassing step-daughter of commercial business models. They release open source either because they need market share for some related idea/product/service, or they simply want community contributions. And why do other people start using and contributing to open source projects? Because of its longevity: it doesn't matter what Linus or Stallman or whoever does, I can be certain that the Linux kernel and the GNU C compiler will be around, and if there are eno
nuker
Original story here
I believe it will be difficult for a company that is making good money by selling proprietary software to suddenly turn open source.
A company going downhill (like Netscape) can do this though, because they have nothing to lose.
I think a successful company will try very hard to find loopholes and get around opening up their primary source of income. Also, if the company is public by that time, will the shareholders like it? Won't they desert the company en masse near the expiration date?
All your favorite sites in one place!
Will the GNU being so political and the GPL not being really "free" just free in the $ world. The GPL is the wrong choice for this. A very bad choice.
I'm just worried that things will get out of hand.... how many millions are we talking before source is released?
Oh, infinite, definitely. This is a proposal coming from programmers, not businesspeople.
Sun and Apple don't have to make money selling their respective operating systems. They can happily make money on "related services" and hardware.
The problem is that every time developers try to deal with legalese, they take this basic humans-are-honest philosophy that works pretty well in development groups and would never, never work in the business world.
The only really reasonable approach is a flat time limit. Basing it on installed seats is a tough call, even, and that's much more straightforward than "money made". Who's going to do the counting -- Sun?
May we never see th
One only has to look at the accounting pratices of the recording industry or the TV and motion picture industry to see what is wrong with this concept. There are accountants out there that will swear that even a movie that makes over $200 million in a few weeks NEVER breaks even if a actor, director or another party has a stake in a percentage of the profits.
This type of GPL license only insures that the work of dedicated programmers will be stolen and used for profit against the intention of the original author. The bottom line is that it is clearly not needed. Most GPL authors support sharing of code, not making millions from it until some magic threshold is reached (at which time the corporation advocating such a scheeme will either lie about the numbers, or just create a "completely different product" right before the threshold is hit and start selling that).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Ive never understood the point of bitching about a story being a dupe. WHO CARES!!! If you have read it before , DONT READ IT AGAIN. Some people may not have caught it the first time. Ever notice they play the same news at 11pm as they did at 5?
This is a BAD IDEA. It seems good on the surface, but it has many problems.
First, what happens if the company never makes the expected volume of sales? People using the software with the belief that it would someday become opensource would then be screwed when commercial support dries up and it is never released OSS.
Second, what exactly is placed in escrow? And how can you know? Perhaps the company will hold back on critical components of the software and you won't discover that until after it's "released".
Third, opensource matters in the early days of a project more than at any other time--it is at this point in time when the project is shaped into what is needed by the community, and when the most critical bugs are found and fixed.
Fourth, there is no need for an "escrow" to do this--a company can release the software under a "community source license" which is not open source and simply state in the license the conditions under which it reverts to the GPL. There is no need for any additional agency.
Fifth, I think it has little strategic value for the copyright owner. If the project is going to be such a great success under a commercial license then why cripple your future sales revenue? Most developers open software in order to gain access to resources they would otherwise lack, or as a means of grabbing market share without having to spend a lot of money on marketing. If a company has such a winning product and the money to market it, I simply don't see the value for them in opening it up!
There are MANY better ways to sit on the fence between the opensource and commercial world:
1. You can release your code under a non-open "community" license but with a sunset clause. The sunset clause states the date on which the code flips over to the GPL. New releases would keep advancing this date, but a two year old release might be available under the GPL for all.
2. You can dual license your software under the GPL and under a commercial license. GPL users must keep all their own code GPL'd, but you sell a closed-source license for $$$ which allows closed source distribution of the product.
3. You can take the BK approach: Provide your software under a "mostly" open license which contains some crippling restriction. Note that the BK license includes a clause that if BitKeeper goes out of business the software reverts to the GPL--not after a certain number of sales, but instead if their open logging servers cease operating for a period of 180 days. (This is not great either, but at least it's tied to the failure of the company--and loss of support for the product--rather than its success!!)
It is really NO GOOD to tie the opening of a software product to its success, especially its financial success. This is simply a bad idea.
But the real question is, is the zero step process patented?
Here's an idea. A company could indicate that it will open source their product(s) if a certain # of paying customers vote to do it. You could then establish a virtual patent system that will guarantee a time lapse until the technology becomes popular enough that a vote is warranted to release it.
Perhaps every paying customer would vote to do this, but I'm not so sure. If I paid for a product, I don't necessarily want my competitors to be able to get it for free! However, once I'm satisfied that the product is a commodity and that I don't want to pay for it any more, I would vote to release it.
Start with this, the company has urned $N-1, where N is its threshold. I have a choice, I can spend a dollar to get the software now, or wait a little while until the next fool pays it, and then I get it for free.
By a reverse induction, it would seem that few people would pay anyhing for such software, preferring to obtain it for free after the others have paid. Unless, of course, the software is obsolete by the time the threshold is met, in which case, the open source benefit is next to nil.
I don't see this as much of a credible business model either -- the software isn't opened up until much later on in the development cycle, at a time where the marketplace's contributions are less beneficial. Accordingly, we get very little of the Bazaar effect, its just free beer later on.
The only reason Adobe make Photoshop is because they can sell it to lots and lots of people. So why not get all those people together and pool your money to pay for the development of an open source product? I guarentee that you'll pay less overall.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Ok let's assume this scheme actually would work.
Imagine you have a piece of software that is being used by the government in some fairly sensitive places.(uh, that didn't come out right)
Anyway, they hit their sales quota and the source gets released. Now every malicious cracker has access to code at the same time as the development community. Imagine if this were a microsoft product! I think the crackers would be finding and exploiting bugs way faster than the open sourcers could fix them.
Don't get me wrong I think open source in it's current form is safer than closed, but that's because while it is gaining market share the security bugs can be worked out.
I'd talked many times with friends and co-workers about the idea of making enough money to retire comfortably, then releasing everything owned by my corp under the LGPL when I shut it down.
Quite a number of individuals think it's a great way of doing things. Unfortunately, large corporations and CEOs of those corporations never seem to be willing to settle for a tidy profit -- it's always got to be a bloodletting of every stone that might have another dollar.
So I do expect you'll see several products eventually released in such fashion, but it's unlikely they'll be "big name" products like Oracle, MS Office, or Notes.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This sounds like a decent idea. I would propose that there be some kind of time limit as well as a revenue limit. Say, 5 years or $5,000,000 in revenue, whichever comes first.
I would also expect that you get the source to begin with so that you're not SOL when the company "changes their mind".
In general, I rarely purchase any software, but I would be happy to purchase something if I had a guarantee that it's going to be opened up later on.
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
The first point, of course, is some agreed means of tracing the sales or revenue. After all, if a company sets the mark fairly low, and then finds out they've got a killer product, they would have to be tempted to fudge the figures to keep the revenue coming in.
The second is that you'd probably want a nominated "end-of-life" date. At that point, the source should be released anyway, regardless of how much money has been raised. 5 years after release would be a suitable point, probably.
You could probably combine them, so that you can have a reducing threshold of revenue vs time.
What I would really like to see, however, is a legal requirement that companies either support software they've sold basically forever (either through patches or free upgrades to more recent releases), or release the source so that somebody else can do the support. There's a lot of machines still running Win95 out there that have major bugs, but MS will never lift a finger to help those people out. I have no problem with companies wanting to sell software, but if there's a bug that causes things to break in a product I've paid cash for, then I want it fixed, dammit!
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
allows vendors to license their products until so many millions are made, then agree to release the code under GPL
What if I release product "Bob" and after I reach threshold-1 licenses I discontinue the product line. But, I immediately then begin marketing product "Jimmy", which had been under development just in time for the end of "Bob", and which happens to satisfy the needs of "Bob" users. Rinse, repeat.
This really looks like a fundamental misunderstanding of the GPL and the nature of source code in general. If someone uses GPL code, they have to make their mods to it available now, not after earning some supposed amount of money. Now if companies want to release their own code that works with free code, wonderful! But what's the point? Selling binaries is a dead end. Free software will always end up doing the same thing better if it does not do it first. Grab the code, use it, make it better, give it back, this is the future and all else is looking back.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I worked for a software company a couple years ago that made Linux-based security software, including a hardened Linux distribution, that was partly funded by DoDefense grants. Even back then, I was told by the people who designed the proposals that the department was very partial to proposals with this kind of license.
Wil
wiki
Is there more info on this subject (not linked from the Slashdot post and not linked in the PC World article) that implies some connection to the GPL? Or is everyone just assuming that "an open source license" means "the GPL"? I even checked some history and none of the previous articles I found on it (including one from Slashdot the other day) mention it as being GPL-related.
Anyway, I don't think I see this proposal being compatible with the GPL itself, but that's also not what the article claimed. The Slashdot post subject is just misleading, AFAICT. It seems like a good proposal, although you'd have to get the right people to trust the Center for Open Source & Government as an escrow agent for it to really work. I have no idea how easy or hard that might be.
101010, 222, 52,
Neither The PCWorld article nor Slashdot give any reference to who is drafting this or how to contact them. I would like to start a formal letter followed perhaps by a popular petition to have this bill either tabled or ammended in a way that gets rid of the obvoious loopholes caused by the abiguity of the proposal's language. As-is, this bill if passed would be non-progressive at best, and completely detrimental to the OSS movement at its worst.
-----------------------------------------
Perversely greped and groped by PowerPenguin
Most commercial software also includes many components licensed from other companies. The company doesn't have the right to open source that. It takes a considerable amount of effort to go through the code and disentangle the 3rd party bits. It may also be necessary to check all comments since there may be libellous comments that are okay within the confines of the company.
For an example of how bad this is, look at how long it took Netscape to release Navigator after they decided to open source it.
IANAL
REMEBER THIS: The GPL Uses Copyright Law to Enforce It's Terms
Licensing software with unusual terms and conditions isn't a new thing, which is what is happening in this case.
1. GPLed software is copyrighted, and in this case is being LICENSED to Company A under the conditions that Company A will release thier code after taking in X dollars in revenue.
2. Company A can't relicense or give its license to Company B because it would violate its license. In the event Company A or B tries a fast one they'll be slapped with a copyright infringement suit and then Company A and B will be worrying about paying thier lawyers and an inflated settlement.
This sort of thing (unusual licensing terms) has been well thought out and is probably well supported with many legal precidents.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
The article doesn't even mention GPL. It specificly mentions Open Source (TM), but nothing about the GPL. If the company gets to choose what license the software reverts to after the target, fine, but the /. story lead me to believe this might be a stealth attempt to foist the GPL on people. That doesn't appear to be the case.
Regardless, it's a moot point anyway. As others have pointed out, companies can just juggle the books to make it look like they never sold that much.
I'd also like to add that this would just be government duplicating a process that already is occuring quite nicely in the free market. For example, Unix was once proprietary, then BSD escaped but before that could happen it was cloned--Linux. Now the same thing is happening with desktops and office suites. This is the process known as "commoditization". It may not protect users of proprietary apps from file-format lockin, but that's OK because if you are concerned about lockin there is an incentive to become an early adapter to the OSS product. In the final stages of commoditization, the early proprietary vendors can no longer make money on their product. Most of them try to "lick the bowl clean" which is inconvenient for a tiny segment of the market that would like to cling to legacy apps, but I'd rather inconvenience that segment than inconvenience everybody by having the government meddle in the software business.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The PC World article linked to never mentions the GNU GPL. The article says that under the plan the software will be "released under an open source license".
For all we know, this could be another way to get corporations to create and distribute software under self-interested Open Source non-Free Software licenses like the APSL. Or this could be a way to get more software released into freedom under Free Software licenses including the GNU GPL that also appear on OSI's acceptable license list. The statements quoted in the PC World article are too vague to jump to saying this will produce more GPL-covered software.
Digital Citizen
As a product approaches it's expiration date, a prospective seller can say to the salesman: "So why should I pay full price for this software if it's going to be free in 4 months?"
An income threshold, on the other hand, allows the sales(wo)man a reasonable response: "If you pay full price, it will get it that much closer to Open Source." There would also, of course, be the support factor.
That having been said, I'd add a couple of caveats: Is the vendor promising to release the original code or the current code at the time the threshold is reached? If it's the original code, then -- unless the threshold is reached in a matter of weeks or months -- that code will be all but useless to the outside community. It will likely be missing all sorts of bug fixes and even enhancements. Slimey companies might even lock down a horribly broken version, and then 'update' to a version that actually works properly for real sales..
I guess this leads to a different issue: Will outside programmers be allowed to view the escrowed source code -- to make sure that it's reasonably clean and maintainable. The last thing I'd want is to find that the company has GPLed a compacted version of their code -- with all the comments and extraneous white space removed.
And, yes -- I'd need a promise based on sales, not profits. The entertainment industry has pretty much perfected the process of making even the most wildly successful project look like a money looser. It would be all to easy for a software company to hire an RIAA certified accounting firm. There should also be a condition that, if a company stops selling a program, that the code gets released after N months -- whether the target has been reached or not.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
I have NewsMonster under a similar license.
The only difference is time. We don't become Open Source based on $$$ we go
OSS based on time. I believe this yields less animosity within the community.
Right now it is three years. I am going to send Tony an email now telling him
that NewsMonster will be under an O-STEP license.
Kevin
It strikes me that as the threshold is approached a company will have less and less incentive to offer support on their product, because after all they will not be able to get direct revenue from the sale for much longer. Likewise development. Why release new versions? At the same time, there will be no open source version, so no one else will be able to fix it.
I think the they key problem here is the assumption that a piece of software is created, and released at one point in time, when this is clearly not the case. Is the Emacs that I use daily 2 months old since that was when it was released. Or is 20 years old because some of the code dates back that far?
Software does not exist at a point in in time, but is a continually developing thing. This is why many companies are moving toward a leasing model, and this is also one of the main advantages of free software...you can track the development as and when you choose, not as the company chooses to release a new version.
Phil
As a very small software vendor, I would rather get the power of distribution of GPL FIRST, and THEN get the benefits and riches of license fees.
Kind of like distributing GIF file format for a long time and then trying to make money off of the patent (see Unisys...).
I WISH it were possible, feasible, and not unpopular to pull that stunt. But I haven't seen it happen successfully yet.
Imagine the lower health care costs if the drug companies could make up their research costs, but once done, would have to distribute at cost!
It's much touted, but is it true?
Can you name a major Open Source development that has been completely discontinued by its original developer(s), and which has been taken on by a new team who have continued to fix up the bugs and add new functionality in the same spirit as the original? Can you name five? Ten?
The OS/FS world is littered with half-done projects, but precious little ever "ships". Most of the worthwhile OS/FS things that do get properly released are big, mass-market products: Linux, obviously, plus office apps, networking tools, and a few decent development tools.
Here, the community effect works wonders, and granted, Linux is unlikely to disappear any time soon. But is this fundamentally because they're Open Source, or because they're mainstream applications that vast numbers of people will always need? I'd argue that both are necessary for the "support effect".
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
O-STEP may seem a nice idea right now, but its a baaad movement for the free software in the long term.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
This is just so much slight of hand BS. Think copyright and patent, The time of their viability just keeps increasing by government fiat. Think congress and lobyists. What makes anyone think the same thing wont happen here. Those who forget the past are condemed to repeat............ You get the idea.
> 3. You can take the BK approach
...
Thanks, but no thanks. I have been bitten by BK and the changing licences. One day I could use it with clear concience, the next day, nope. And as a new release ends the licence to older releases
Now I use aegis, and I am happier. (Integrated testing, for one thing.)
There are no laws that corps need to maximize shareholder profit or share values, that just happens to be the way they are killing themselves right now. Look back 20-30 years, and you'll see that supporting the community, helping the employees, long-term R&D investment, etc. have historically been at least as important as pure profit. Why? So the company would be durable and continue to survive.
If you release a product into some OSS license after making a reasonable profit on top of the development costs, who do you think is going to be the primary maintainer? Who do you think has the developers that will be hired to do enhancements?
Most importantly, do you really think a company has any longevity by focusing on one product forever? Even the much vaunted masters of greed in Redmond don't rely on just one product to survive -- they market dozens, and continually try to find the next "big thing." Most support/enhancement developrs I know would be offended at your implication that they can only have one good idea in a lifetime.
Lotus 1-2-3 was once a key application, now it's just one minor component of a suite (if it even exists anymore.) This is the normal lifecycle of software -- MS Office and MS Windows are aberrations, not the norm.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Let's say I'm the head of a huge company who doesn't want to release my source to anyone even though I've agreed to the contract. My software is wildly successful but I'm reaching the threshhold soon.
What do I do? I release version x.1 of the software. The codebase has changed. Perhaps something has been added, but the point is that it isn't the same software. My company was working on the new version anyway. As a matter of fact, it makes sense to only release so many copies of each version.
Can some one please explain this Open source thing? You write a bunch of code burning mid night oil and give it away for free? Everybody else using it benefits, except the creators... well, "everybody benefits" is the wrong thing to say, because a bunch of other engineers will get laid off because greedy companies would see that they can now get away with fewer engineers because some fool wrote a bunch of code and gave it away for free, so why pay your inhouse engineers to write the same thing. Only big greedy hardware companies benefits from all this because some fools are writing code to run on their big iron for free. Why are engineers doing to themselves what happend to musicians with MP3?
This sounds a lot like the street-performer protocol by Schneier et al.