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

[Madison Kelly]

Thanks everyone for commenting, here is an update (a final decision is 
still pending). My boss understands my position and argument which 
matches with those I heard here. I have also been reading through the 
GPL FAQ that Lloyd put me onto which is also proving useful.

What I need to hammer down is if the idea I think we are going to go 
with is feasible/legal. I want to release a basic version under 
something (I don't think the GPL will do) that is more for a single 
server and then have a fuller version for sale (for a period until we 
make our money back when we will GPL the whole shebang) as Wil suggested 
(and Lance at my work). I just need to figure out what license and still 
get the okay from my boss.

Anyway, so far so good and thanks!

Madison

cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org wrote:
>>So like others said, it depends on the nature of the program.
> 
> 
> The success of an open source project is _vitally_ dependent on there
> being a community being prepared to continue development of the
> software.
> 
> Adabas-D is an example of a cautionary tale.
> 
> -> SAP AG bought the source license from Software AG to provide them an
>    alternative to Oracle, which is a useful bargaining chip.
> 
> -> The renamed SAP-DB turned out to be something of a "tarbaby;" it's a
>    pretty frightening code base that combines:
> 
>    - It was written in a combination of C and C++ by Germans, hence
>      naming conventions are Germanic.
> 
>    - It came from the mainframe world, so it's just rife with modularity
>      based on 8 character names that were once somewhat mnemonic, in
>      German.
> 
>    - It uses mainframey customized build tools in lieu of, oh, say,
>      Makefiles.  It proved easier to port the build tools to Linux
>      than to move over to Makefiles.
> 
> SAP was successful; Oracle backed down.  But they were now left
> maintaining this "tarbaby."
> 
> They tried "open sourcing" it, but there was only minscule interest
> shown in managing the code base.
> 
> They gave up on it, passing the "tarbaby" on to MySQL AB.  It is not
> totally evident just what the strategy can be there; the code is SO
> unusable for integration purposes that I can't see this as being
> anything other than a strategy to allow there to be some minimal amount
> of maintenance to keep it running on the dwindling numbers of Unixes,
> where it'll eventually die when no one that is using it now cares
> anymore.
> 
> Numerous "open source" projects have failed when no one cared to work on
> them anymore.
> 
> Tcl is also in this category; while it hasn't yet formally died, the
> community is not nearly large enough to support ongoing development of
> vital libraries as are found with Perl and Python.
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