On July 31, 2002 12:05 am, Wm. G. McGrath wrote: > is not exactly professional. In the real world, an IT professional > may be called upon to support many licences, so it's important to > provide an objective platform or standpoint that is ideology neutral > as well as vendor and distro neutral and allows a professional to do > their job without getting involved in such 'concerns'. Remember few > flame wars are ever resolved successfully. That's not where we want > to go.
If we're going to be ideology neutral, then we're also going to be license-neutral. That's omething *I* have no problem with, but I know a lot of people in the Linux community do. I may be perceived as a heretic for saying this, but so be it. Fact is, Apache is free software, but the company that signs the pay cheques of most Apache developers, Covalent Technologies, also sells per CPU enterprise server software based over Apache. As far as I can tell, the enhancements they've added aren't open source. My point is that if companies can sell proprietary software and still be considered open source companies, why do we need to take a need to be take such a stand on licensing that those companies don't? I agree with Linus Torvalds on this issue: "My opinion on licenses is that "he who writes the code gets to chose his license, and nobody else gets to complain". Anybody complaining about a copyright license is a whiner." (Source: http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/linus.html ) I say we argue that open source is a *good* thing and our preference, but that we're not against using proprietary software. I don't think OSI is either. -- Jason Wallwork Anthony's Law of Force: Don't force it; get a larger hammer. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
