> > Branding. Phone support lines. Legal departments/Lawsuit prevention.
Figuring
> > out how to prevent open source from stealing the thunder by duplicating
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > features. And building a _product_.
Oops. You didn't really mean that, did you? Could it be that there are some
people out there thinking "let them free software fools do the hard initial
work, once things are working nicely, we take over, add a few "secret"
ingredients, and voila - the commercial product has been created?
After reading the statement above I believe that surely most of the honest
developers involved in postgres would wish they had chosen GPL as licensing
scheme.
I agree that most of the work is always done by a few. I also agree that it
would be nice if they could get some financial reward for it. But no dirty
tricks please. Do not betray the base. Otherwise, the broad developer base
will be gone before you even can say "freesoftware".
I, for my part, have learned another lesson today. I was just about to give
in with the licensing scheme in our project to allow the GPL incompatible
OpenSSL to be used. After reading the above now I know it is worth the extra
effort to "roll our own" or wait for another GPL'd solution rather than
sacrificing the unique protection the GPL gives us.
Horst
coordinator gnumed project