Open Source Community's Double Standard

Posted by kdawson on Monday August 13, 2007 @07:41AM from the wax-fecund-and-celebrate dept.

AlexGr writes to point out a really good point Matt Asay raises in his CNET News Blog: Why do we praise closed source companies who open up a little bit, but damn open source companies who close down a little bit? "Deja vu. Remember 2002? That's when Red Hat decided to split its code into Red Hat Advanced Server (now Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Fedora. Howls of protest and endless hand-wringing ensued: How dare Red Hat not give everything away for free? Enter 2007. MySQL decides to comply with the GNU General Public License and only give its tested, certified Enterprise code to those who pay for the service underlying that code (gasp!). Immediately cries of protest are raised, How dare MySQL not give everything away for free?"

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Testing a theory by ccguy · 2007-08-13 08:33 · Score: 0, Offtopic

Whenever an article about open source and companies' policies is posted, moderation points fly by, so this must be a good article to get karma :-)

I don't have anything insightful to say so I'm shooting for informative. Here's what the mysterious future brings (yes, I bought 1000 pages, I wanted a few frist potss but turns out you can't post before it's released to genpop, WTF)

"A team of four Thai students beat out 10,000 competitors to win the $25,000 prize in Microsoft 2007 Imagine Cup. Their project is text-to-speech software in which computers read aloud typed and handwritten commands. The software will allow people who can't read to interact with a PC. Imagine Cup judge Rand Morimoto has been blogging on the whole experience -- from his video of the opening ceremonies to how contestants swilled free Cokes to keep themselves awake during the 24-hour, no-sleep phase of the competition."

There.