support requirement

[Forrest J. Cavalier III]

> department. Thus, one of X's _main_goals_ in making the software Open
> Source is that commercial vendors pick it up and _provide_support_ for it.
> 
> Thus, their license requires that if you distribute a derived work of their
> program _and_ you provide support on reasonably comparable programs,
> that you provide support for their program too. The provision has no effect
> on organizations like Debian that don't provide support.

Fix your ISO procedures to say that open source
software doesn't need external vendor support.

The whole point of open source is that you can write
items into your ISO manuals that say "we can self support
and audit this software, since we have the source
code."  

I have a very hard time imagining any corporation large enough to
sustain a research department that has not a single line of
internally developed software as part of a critical ISO-9000
product path (not even a shell script!?).  Their ISO manual must
include some way that internally-written software that is
internally-supported is considered "approved."

It smells like personality politics to me.  OpenSource can't solve
every problem.  They can require whatever they want in their license,
but I doubt that condition will have the intended effect:
Any "extra" requirements are going to reduce the likelihood
of adoption of their software in general, and therefore reduce
the market for companies considering providing support.

If they really want to play the letter of the law, instead
of the spirit of ISO (which is to ensure there are no shaky
bridges), they could release it as open source without the
extra clause, AND they should pay a retainer fee to a willing
software developer, able and willing to offer a year's support
at some pre-agreed hourly rate.  Definition met.  Letter of
law obeyed.  (Shaky bridge still in place, but hey,
even MicroSoft is a shaky bridge for some products....
And Y2K is going to see a lot of other shaky support bridges
exposed as well....)

Forrest J. Cavalier III, Mib Software  Voice 570-992-8824 
The Reuse RKT: Efficient awareness for software reuse: Free WWW site
lists over 6000 of the most popular open source libraries, functions,
and applications.  http://www.mibsoftware.com/reuse/