Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on July 25, 2003 09:18 PM
Forcing an OSI approved license will prevent any commercial enterprise from supplying into government. OSI licenses force free (gratis) redistribution (clause 1 of the OSI definition), so a commercial enterprise could sell exactly ONE license to ONE customer EVER, and that customer could redistribute to their heart's content.
This is a BAD thing. While OSS may be mature enough in the server, desktop and even enterprise markets, it doesn't cover all the applications that are required by large organisations and/or governments. There is no Open Source equivalent of SAP or JDE. None of the OSS/FSF databases have the enterprise functionality (scalability and usability especially) of (say) Oracle.
In short government would be forced to fund development of Open Source software to meet their needs, when they could far more cheaply acquire a stable commercial equivalent. And don't even argue with me about the cost issue until you have MANY years experience in software development management.
Now I fully support the idea of "source available" being a government requirement, that is, the source MUST come with the product, but is still covered by Copyright and standard commercial licensing. Government cannot use the source unless the supplier goes out of business or refuses to support the product any longer, but has it for such extreme cases. But an OSI license? Certainly NOT.
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OSI forces gratis redistribution
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on July 25, 2003 09:18 PMForcing an OSI approved license will prevent any commercial enterprise from supplying into government. OSI licenses force free (gratis) redistribution (clause 1 of the OSI definition), so a commercial enterprise could sell exactly ONE license to ONE customer EVER, and that customer could redistribute to their heart's content.
This is a BAD thing. While OSS may be mature enough in the server, desktop and even enterprise markets, it doesn't cover all the applications that are required by large organisations and/or governments. There is no Open Source equivalent of SAP or JDE. None of the OSS/FSF databases have the enterprise functionality (scalability and usability especially) of (say) Oracle.
In short government would be forced to fund development of Open Source software to meet their needs, when they could far more cheaply acquire a stable commercial equivalent. And don't even argue with me about the cost issue until you have MANY years experience in software development management.
Now I fully support the idea of "source available" being a government requirement, that is, the source MUST come with the product, but is still covered by Copyright and standard commercial licensing. Government cannot use the source unless the supplier goes out of business or refuses to support the product any longer, but has it for such extreme cases. But an OSI license? Certainly NOT.
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