IPL as a burden

[Andrew J Bromage]

G'day all.

On Wed, Jan 17, 2001 at 06:48:44PM -0800, Frank LaMonica wrote:

> Please clarify or expand on that statement.

The issue under discussion was what incentive would hackers have for
contributing to a product released under a Source Included Software
scheme that was not Open Source such as, for example, software released
under the IPL as it currently exists.

Someone from intraDAT (I think it was Manfred) said earlier that the
company would offer money to people who sent improvements to their
software back to them if they included it in the product.  No details
have come out about how this would be done or what guarantees there
would be (and nor should they; this is an OSS licence discussion list,
not a forum for discussing business practices of non-OSS companies),
however I think this addresses the point.  Rather than building an
external group of unfunded developers under the bazaar-based OSS model,
build an external group of partially-funded developers.

I don't pretend to have any insight as to whether or not such a
business model would succeed in the real world.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage