Strip mining of open source (ITPro)

ITPro has posted a lengthy article looking at the differences in corporate behavior brought about by different free software licenses. "IBM has taken a three-year old version of OpenOffice, 1.1.4, which was the last release to be dual-licensed by Sun, and has heavily modified the code, which it has no obligation to release back to the community, and has clearly chosen this version precisely because this is the case. The perceived advantage for IBM is that the part-proprietary code can be marketed uniquely as an IBM product, and the extensions don't have to be released back to the community. As a result, IBM has effectively forked the code and cannot take advantage of later enhancements to OpenOffice."

Comments (4 posted)