Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 20, 2010 4:39 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core? by butlerm
Parent article: Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

I don't even mind the proprietary fork, except that the next step is always to prevent the opensource version from gaining some of the features that the proprietary version has to protect the company income.

Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?

Posted Jul 20, 2010 6:16 UTC (Tue) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]

If a company wants to produce a proprietary version of a core package, certainly the legitimate way to do it is to create hooks and/or plugin support so that others can do the same. No fork required.

Personally, I am skeptical of the merit of any substantial open source software project that multiple companies can't each participate in and add value to in their own way. At best the open source character of a single company dominated project (like MySQL) is as an insurance policy against the day when the project management by that company becomes intolerable or fails entirely. Otherwise it seems more like a PR move with marginal side benefits than a game changer for the software industry.