On Sun, 2008-01-13 at 12:42 -0600, Alexandro Colorado wrote: > Well to a degree I agree with the guy. FLOSS is for developers not for > users. The interest of floss is to get developers to improve the > product. Commercial vehiecles are made to sell it to the end user and > that is why so many products has a dual license. In theory StarOffice > should be the consumer oriented product with things users care like > balance checkbooks on spreadsheet or make xmass letters on Writer. >
I respectfully disagree, as do millions of Firefox and Thunderbird users (not to mention all of us who use Linux or other FLOSS operating systems for our daily business). Whether an item is considered "Free Software" or "Proprietary" is determined by its license terms, nothing more. Simply being "Free Software" does not imply a specific development methodology or quality. It is much harder to close development on a Free Software project, because by definition the license must allow modifications. However, nothing requires you, the developer, to accept those modifications in the product you distribute. Conversely, there is no rule which says a "proprietary" licenseholder cannot allow modifications from outside the shop if it so wishes (e.g., the Microsoft "shared source" model). Dual-licensing is not done to allow a product to be sold to consumers. I do not know every open source license in existence, but every major license I can think of -- for example, the GPL, the Mozilla license, BSD license, Sun's PDL, the OSL -- allows the commercial sale of the product. Normally, vendors dual-license a product in order to allow the inclusion of non-free plugins or code that would not be permitted under the "derivative works" or similar clause in the selected open source license. For example, you might sell a piece of software to a customer who wants to modify it to include code that is a company trade secret. In that case, you might relicense the code to allow your customer to make the necessary modifications. One may say that a particular piece of software is more appropriate for a purpose or audience than another piece of software. A particular piece of proprietary software may very well be more "consumer-oriented" than a similar piece of FLOSS. But the converse may also be true. I would say, from years of experience, that Firefox with its plugins is far more "consumer-oriented" than IE is. But neither of us can credibly say that all proprietary software is more consumer-oriented than all FLOSS, or vice versa. Matthew Copple [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
