[P2P-F] are there examples of open code harvested by commercial developers?

Karl Robillard krobillard at san.rr.com
Sat Sep 10 23:49:56 CEST 2011


Hello Johannes,

The original article is warning traditional market participants that open 
source means giving your blueprints away.  Yes, you have the option of giving 
away only part of your designs.  For those of us not interested in domination 
games, the larger point is that openness and price can be orthogonal.  We can 
engage with the old system while developing it's replacement.

My favorite example is RedHat, for which the word 'harvest' seems to fit quite 
well.  Fedora Linux is a community project fostered by RedHat and every few 
years they will take the latest version and further develop it for commercial 
users which must (and are more than willing to) pay a lot of money.  Users 
without money can then take advantage of RedHat's engineering efforts by using 
one of the RHEL derivatives such as CentOS or Scientific Linux.


-Karl




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