Hello Todd, I belive that Interbase story is very useful to understand what big companies think about opensource. Borland moved to opensource with two projects Interbase and Kylix: at today they abandon Interbase and continue with Kylix. But the ideas move the world and from the ashes of Interbase born the FireBird project firebird.sourceforge.net Bye, Claudio
On Tue, 18 Mar 2003, Smith, Todd wrote: > Hello Wayne, > > I know that abandonware advocates feel they are preserving end-of-life > products in sometimes a gray-market fashion. Some abandonware ware products > have been officially released as open-source; Borland's Interbase is the > example that comes to mind. > > Anything that encourages companies or individual programmers to release any > software into open-source is a good thing, IMHO. I know that there are > plenty of abandoned open-source projects out there but a common issue is > very little working code. Any mature commercial code that gets open-sourced > is hopefully a gold mine for seasoned functions that get used somewhere else > very quickly. > > Todd Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > -----Original Message----- > From: Wayne Wilson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Since the we can assume that the development costs of word perfect are > no longer on Corel's books, then by putting WP into this escrow plan > with sales threshold on it, they would hope to recover some value at > least equal to what they would get trying to sell the rights to the > product on the market (which since open office came on the scene, this > value is probably very low). > > If however, one has just developed a product in the traditional > commercial model the only ROI comes from the large sales volume (if > ever) should the product make it up the adoption cycle. That means if > you still thought you could make it with this product your sales volume > would be set very high before you turned open source. Therefore it > seems likely to me that this service will act a 'life boat' kind of > value preservation for products no longer at play in the commercial markets. > > --
