Open Source Business Found Parasitic, and the ADCL

[Rick Moen]

Quoting James Harrell (jharrell at copernicusllc.com):

> It's interesting that when the "not-free" world tries to move in the
> direction of the "free" world, there is little or no budge from the
> free world to accomodate this.

I'm not under the impression that this mailing list is a bargaining
table for haggling over whether the OSD should be altered to accomodate
sundry parties' business models.

> The snippet below exemplifies what I beleive to be the net sum of how
> the free world has no interest in a truly commercially viable Open
> Source license:

Then, you have gone _very_ far out of your way to overinterpret, since I
said no such thing.  I'd be obliged if you would stick to the plain and
very specific wording of my post, rather than try to read grand themes
in it on matters that my wording did not address.

> Though I cannot say for sure, most likely this individual or company
> was not looking for free advertising, but instead looking for a way to
> provide contributions back to the Open Source community; but hasn't
> yet found a method of doing so that will protect the investments in
> intellectual property.

I can only go by what the gentleman posted:  He was yet another person
wanting the OSD to be rewritten to accomodate his interests.

> So what we're really looking for is a license called "Partially Open
> Source" or "Commercial Open Source" that will allow a company to
> protect small portions of a larger product.

This can be done already!  Apply a suitable OSI-approved licence to
portions of a codebase you wish to open source, and keep the rest under
proprietary terms.  It's commonly done, e.g., in recent versions of
Netscape Communicator -- as I disinctly recall having been recently
pointed out, yet again, right on this mailing list.

I'd be astonished if that option were not already well known to the
original poster.  If not, and if it's what he needs, then I regret the
fact that he didn't just go with it and save us all a large dose of
inflammatory rhetoric and special pleadings.

-- 
Cheers,                    Long ago, there lived a creature with a 
Rick Moen                  voice like a vacuum cleaner.  We know little
rick at linuxmafia.com        about it, but we do know that it ate cats.
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