Hi, How could the original founder of an open source project, protect and keep his project as his own, and prevent other external factors ( a company or group of developers) from getting his source, invest a lot of money on the base project, start their own businness out of it, and leave the original developer out of the way?
It may well happen that, a promising open source project is abandoned due to the fact that some company just has enough money to raise the leverage on the project and claim his own *branch*, make it effectively better than the original *base* and attract all open source developers to this branch, who would otherwise continue developing on the *base*. A second issue is, how could copyrights prevent this problem, if at all? Would it be unethical, or inappropriate to say, "this project is mine, and no entity can start a project with the same purpose, using my sources", at least temporarily until the project gets enough leverage that no external factor can interfere? Perhaps even doing so, since your sources are publicly accessed, one could easily grasp your novel idea and rewrite it from scratch, having had the financial resources that you don't, and "raise above the water like olive oil" (is what Turks say for this). Or maybe this is the fact of life, and projects should continue by tough, natural selection? Maybe if it's a really novel idea, get patents for it, not to put it as an obstacle to others but just to be in control of what you've started. How does/should it work? Thanks, Bahadir _______________________________________________ Gnu-misc-discuss mailing list Gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
