My fiscal responcibility to my company ver. Open Source - advice please

[Anton Markov]

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Hi,

Madison Kelly wrote:
>   So, I have been arguing strongly to release to program open source.
> The boss and marketting guy wants to release it closed so that we can
> recoupe the investment they made and feed the company. Am I
> misunderstanding the Linux community? I don't want to go into the
> debate
> and push full out for an open source release if it hurts the company I
> work for but I also want to give back to the community that has helped
> me so often.

Remember also, that the main power of Opensource is not about free beer,
it's power lies in that other people can contribute to the software and
to make it better. However, for this to happen the program should be of
interest to a large enough community of users. If the host company goes
out of business or moves on to other things, the program that is no
longer updated and maintained is of no use to the community (or the
customers who get it for free).

So like others said, it depends on the nature of the program.

I also like the idea of a delayed opensource release, or perhaps a
Private Source license. There was a thread on this some time ago:

<http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.tolug/6361/>


Just my 2 cents.


- -- 
Anton Markov <("anton" + "@" + "truxtar" + "." + "com")>

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