Jim Glaspole wrote: > As a Medtech user I thought a lot about James' letter over the > weekend. As has been said before the frustrations he is experiencing > with software vendors are pretty universal. > I am interested to know from the open source gurus on the list whether > any of the following is feasible: > Assuming in the future Medtech decide the move into the Australian > market was a mistake and they want to get out to reduce support costs > etc, is it possible to release a version of software like Medtech > under a GPL for a territory while keeping a profitable commercial > version in another territory, i.e. NZ? No. The GPL does not permit such a restriction.
> Based on the above would it be likely that a band of volunteers would > be able to help the stranded "Medtech" users develop and improve the > product? In theory yes. In practice no. There will be some serious work involved in supporting them. Serious work should not be left to volunteers and should be undertaken on a commercial basis. > Assuming the new "Medtech" can be untied from its Interbase back end > (this time assuming the basic database structure is close enough to > "good") and plugged into Firebird or another SQL based database, can > new (less dowdy) front ends be developed that would run securely in a > browser? > Would this ideally use Ruby on Rails? Yes but again it is serious work but one where you might find some volunteers keen to have a go. I have not read the Medtech thread. I presume there is no suggestion that they are ever likely to release the source code. David _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
