>If you do a subroutine and do NOT release its source in one of a variety of
>ways, -- then in a sense you "FORKED the tree" -- right? You made it such
>that there are now 2-copies of OC out there that are different.
>
>What then? -- We all loose. That is the big NO-NO for an OPEN project. It
>makes for one of the flaws in the get-a-long, and is what really hurt the
>early flavors of UNIX, way back. Those are some mistakes from history that
>should NOT be repeated. Plain and simple.
Mark,
trouble is, we want OC to be attractive to companies as well as to private
individuals. People *must* be able to create stacks and ship them (possibly
as a runtime, which means including OC) and charge money for the product
they create. Also, companies who have proprietary technology should be able
to plug it in w/o releasing it to the public.
IMHO, it is much worse if we write OC and then no one uses it because the
license is too restricted than if we make a very open license and a few
companies make proprietary fixes to OC. Most companies today use Open
Source *and* share, because they know that in Open Source there is a
strength in numbers they can not hope to achieve otherwise. We'd even fix
bugs in their code if they made it general enough that it can be integrated
into our distribution, and if they submitted the source to us.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
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