On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 07:49:47AM -0800, Dan Kegel wrote: > On 1/18/06, Bryce Harrington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I did a bit of brainstorming on questions I would imagine little ISVs > > might have. What do you think? > > The list seems fine. I hesitate at the "open source the linux > version of my app", > though; the source tree should be the same for both Windows and Linux > versions, so open sourcing one means open sourcing the other. > Best leave that question out.
Hmm, good point, though this is actually a real question I got (from Xara, who is open sourcing the Linux version of their Xara Xtreme product - http://www.xara.com/press/pressrelease.asp). The answer, of course, is like you say - you can't open source on one platform and expect it not to get ported to all the rest. But perhaps the question would be better stated as "I am considering Open Sourcing my application. What issues should I be aware of?" Xara had a lot of questions around this and did a lot of research into it, so I think it's a question worth keeping on the list. As an aside, with Xara it's pretty intriguing to see that for them, open source makes sense not just as a principle but also from several business perspectives. For one thing, since they are not the leaders in their market, and since their competition is pretty stiff, they need every angle they can get, and for them open source gives them a path that they know their competition can't go down. One of the major issues they had was how to license their code such that they can continue selling commercialized versions (with proprietary 3rd party modules like Pango), but prohibit their competitors from doing the same, and without alienating the community. I think we arrived at a workable approach, but I'm still waiting for the actual code drop... Bryce > We need people to go sit in the trenches with the ISVs > for a while, though, I think. I'm trying to do that with > small ISVs who want to sell their Windows apps unchanged > on Linux using Wine. No success stories yet, but I'm working on it :-) > > -- > Wine for Windows ISVs: http://kegel.com/wine/isv
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