Kingsley Idehen wrote: > Nathan wrote: >> >> AFAIK geospatial is only in the commercial edition. Which is a shame :( >> > Nathan, > > Shame?
hopefully no crossed wires from my scots dialect :) not as in "shameful", rather meaning "it would be great if it was included!" > We do have to make a trade-off at some point between Open Source and > Closed Source. > > I know you don't imply our product is worth $0.00, but I would like to > discuss the matter for sure. > > Our point of view: > our product is provides huge value, and the work is extremely complex. > How do we sustain this behemoth of a project without some kind of > monetary compensation? > > Remember, not only is there an Open Source Edition of Virtuoso, it is > also used across the Linked Data from DBpedia, to DBpedia-Live, to a > majority of the bubbles in the Linked Data cloud. In all cases, OpenLink > is doing the heavy lifting (and incurring serious $ costs). > > > I am sure you agree, Virtuoso is very aggressively priced, as per our > pricing page [1] :-) > > Anyway, lets discuss as I am very open to thoughts from the community > re. this important matter. > > > Links: > > 1. http://www.openlinksw.com/virtuoso/sales/vpricing2.htm As per usual you and your company excel, open dialogue on these matters is fantastic :) Open source licensing and monetization is a huge subject; so skipping the more formal talk, here's how I'd classify virtuoso "clients" (I know it extends beyond this): 1: Developers who use it for there own personal stack, developing software, learning etc 2: Open Source (non-profit) efforts; dbpedia's, people working tirelessly in there own time to create linked data sets in the scientific community etc 3: Small organisations and private entities who want to grasp the future way of doing things but don't have "enterprise" budgets (or even budgets often) 4: Research Orgs and Institutions, those funded organisations who would massively benefit from virtuoso and have some budget for it. 5: Typical Organisations and Enterprises with 1-**** Servers (more than 10 threads up to clusters). 3, 4 and 5 I think are catered for in the pricing model perfectly; with 3 being the grey area between VOS and Commercial 10-thread licenses. As for 1 & 2, who are essentially the "community" - I'm not sure the licensing appeals to them; it's a trade off of functionality (not that vos is lacking in any way) against forking out $1000-1600, which is a lot of money on a personal / open source level; and at the same time, these are the very people who would embrace, adopt and push virtuoso's newest features such as the geospatial extension. As I'm sure you are aware, if I had a local copy you'd soon have a list of bug reports & suggestions back which would help you improve the service for the paying clients. However, I'm also aware of license abuse, and that if the code was in the public domain certain entities in classes 3-5 above would simply use the VOS alternative rather than paying licenses (until they needed support and clusters!). All in, I'm unsure of how to approach this, I do know though that Virtuoso is one of the few bits of kit I would consider paying for even just to learn (and if you had a donation button, I'd have clicked it) - certainly 1600 is out of the question though (sadly). Perhaps a "non-commercial" license would be an idea? or perhaps a low cost license for people and entities with a low end server; single processor typical lamp stack or suchlike. At the same time, I can't see it being an issue that would stop anybody adopting virtuoso, and certainly doesn't rate that strongly with me; sure it'd be nice to test/learn some of the commercial features but it doesn't inhibit me, if any of the features did come close to being "needed" though, it would be the spatial functions - they really open up a world of options, as you know :) Many Regards & thanks thus far for virtuoso / ods + all your help and time! Nathan
