On Fri, 15 Oct 2010, MJ Ray wrote:
david@lang.hm wrote:
On Thu, 14 Oct 2010, MJ Ray wrote:
So does this also suggest that a dependent company project might not remain entirely FOSS, too?
it depends how you define FOSS, I don't know why you think that Ubuntu doesn't qualify, but there are MANY other examples of opensource projects run by companies, other people mentioned MySQL, but there is also ghostscript, cups, LLVM, OpenOffice.org that I can think of off the top of my head. Apple sponsers quite a few different projects.
I define FOSS as Free and Open Source Software, as usual. See http://fsfe.org/about/basics/freesoftware.en.html
Ubuntu doesn't qualify because of software one couldn't modify.
what software in Ubuntu are you not allowed to modify?
The examples that I recognise on that list don't have their own not-for-profit host corporations, but they are brilliant! MySQL I covered in another email, as it ends up with founders forking into a Swiss not-for-profit. ghostscript has definitely moved around between FOSS (GPL) and non-FOSS (AFPL) versions over time. OpenOffice.org is currently having a forking good time: let's wait and see how it ends.
If anyone posts more, I'm not going to continue pointing out that these aren't projects with their own not-for-profit host corporations.
if you are looking for a opensource product with a not-for-profit corp and a for-profit corp involved, mozilla is a huge example (although I assume you will claim that firefox is not free software due to the fact that you can't change it and keep the branding the same) David Lang