[h2o-discuss] RealNames mixing open and proprietary

["Robert S. Thau" <rst@ai.mit.edu>]

wendy@seltzer.com writes:
 > Where does this practice fit within the "open" lexicon?  Is a
 > similar tying arrangement the real reason why any commercial
 > enterprise offers open source code?  Thoughts?

It's a reason why a lot of them are doing it, particularly
johnny-come-lately bandwagon jumpers like RealNames.  For instance,
there are web consulting companies like Digital Creations and Ars
Digita who release their internally-developed toolkits (Zope and the
ArsDigita Community System respectively) for general use.  

These toolkits are the same code that they'd use to build a site on a
commercial contract, but they are perfectly useful on their own (Bruce
Perens' technocrat.net, for instance, runs on Zope), and aren't tied
in any way to any other commercial product.

(I could mention Red Hat as well --- at least two commercial
competitors, Caldera and Mandrake, got their start as modified
versions of Red Hat, and a third, SuSE, which is dominant in Europe,
uses Red Hat's RPM packaging technology, which they released under
GPL.  But someone might quibble about whether an outfit that's never
made a profit is a bona fide commercial enterprise...).

rst