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Can You Be Denied the Right To Support OSS?
jerico.dev writes "I am currently selecting a CM tool for a project. Important condition: the software must be OSI compliant. I considered Alfresco, since they call themselves 'open source.' Then I heard from several of Alfresco's partners that they are not allowed to do projects based on Alfresco's GPL edition because their partnership contract denied them the right to do so. They only can support Alfresco's enterprise edition. But Alfresco's VP of business development Matt Asay told me that their enterprise edition is not OSI compliant. Does anyone in the Slashdot crowd have experience with partner contracts of other OSS vendors? Is it normal that Sun, Red Hat, etc. force their partners to decline projects based on their open source editions? It's probably legal to do so, but do you think it is legitimate and fair?"
>He asked whether the behaviour is "legitimate and fair" and specifically distinguished that from whether it's legal.
'distinguished from' doesn't apply...
legimate: lawfully begotten
Your second assumption is that the OP is male. Given your spelling of behavior, I'd say you're prone to casual use of the English language overall - vis-à-vis the law as just one example.
Why is there ANY problem with a company releasing source and not supporting it? Isn't that the whole purpose of Open Source? Isn't that why Stallman got into opening source in the first place... so he wouldn't be reliant on the vendor to fix code? If a company releases the source to a program, by definition that program is "Open Source".