On Fri, 2009-04-17 at 22:02 -0500, Stuart Stevenson wrote: > why could you 'not go commercial'? > > On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 7:26 PM, Jim Fleig - CNC Services > <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Any comments Ray H. ...? Now that I'm retired, I don't have much time left over from business. My 0.00401k investment plan certainly isn't going to feed me. Even all the paperwork won't burn long enough to warm my hands in April. Just a bit of history here. Nearly all of the larger open-source projects have legal entities associated with them. Some of these count annual value in billions of US dollars. In all of the projects I've looked at, the process of developing that legal entity was a cause for some tension among the developers and adherents. At the same time those entities have facilitated systematic development. I argued at several annual board meetings, most notably during the annual meeting of the board at the first Fest in Ann Arbor, that we (EMC) needed such an entity to interface between developers and commercial interests like Sherline and Smithy. Today there is a much more diversified commercial community surrounding us. I believe the need is greater now than then. We would do well to set up a legally recognized entity and establish folk who can relate to and argue for each of the many kinds of activities we do and to which our software is applied. That entity should "own" things like linuxcnc.org, the EMC2-CNC marks, and other stuff related to the work we do. Yes there will no doubt be some wrangling over cash and value but how much more intense can it be than some of the sessions that JohnK and I had over HAL. We both are strong willed and I think John, and those sessions produced some great results. We really enjoyed fighting with the Mazak, and winning. Thanks to all who helped with it. I believe we share a lot of good will toward each other. Our formal and informal meetings and our success stories have done a lot to mitigate the ease with which web based groups can fall into divisive and antagonistic posting. EMC2 is AWESOME -- as are the folk that surround it. Long live Hoyt, CNC's anti-model. May we never take that bait. Rayh ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stay on top of everything new and different, both inside and around Java (TM) technology - register by April 22, and save $200 on the JavaOne (SM) conference, June 2-5, 2009, San Francisco. 300 plus technical and hands-on sessions. Register today. Use priority code J9JMT32. http://p.sf.net/sfu/p _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
