At 12:26 PM 2/13/2002, Paul Millar wrote:
It's hard to conceive of a rational business model that did not recognize the advantage of offloading maintenance of non-strategic code to an open source team.
True for non-strategic code, but what about _strategic_ code (strategic in the sense that the business model assumes the retention of IP-rights). If this is based on BSD-licensed code then there is no incentive to release the code back to the community.
Whether or not it's based on BSD-licensed code, it's a good idea for the business not to release it for everyone to use. If it's of real value, though, it will probably have a lot of originality to it.
--Brett
On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, Brett Glass wrote:
At 12:26 PM 2/13/2002, Paul Millar wrote:
[snip]
True for non-strategic code, but what about _strategic_ code (strategic in the sense that the business model assumes the retention of IP-rights). If this is based on BSD-licensed code then there is no incentive to release the code back to the community.
Whether or not it's based on BSD-licensed code, it's a good idea for the business not to release it for everyone to use. If it's of real value, though, it will probably have a lot of originality to it.
Sure, some of the code will have to be original, since noone pays money for old rope. But, if the majority of code is from the BSD-licensed project, you have a situation where a company has taken BSD-licensed code, adopted it to its own use and _cannot_ release the improvements back to the community.
Would people care if this happened to wine?
Paul.
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Brett Glass -
Paul Millar