[Koha] Fwd: LibLime ideas on a Koha Software Foundation

[david at lang.hm]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2010, MJ Ray wrote:

> david at lang.hm wrote:
>> On Thu, 14 Oct 2010, MJ Ray wrote:
>>> A foundation 40%-controlled by Liblime doesn't seem independent to me,
>>> so I feel it should be moved, but I can't think of how to name where
>>> it should go.  Does a vendor tie seem in keeping with a FOSS project
>>> host corporation to anyone?
>>
>> it's actually very common, think about Fedora, Ubuntu, SuSE to name just
>> three.
>
> Fedora, Ubuntu and SuSE seem to be dependent company projects of
> RedHat, Canonical and Novell respectively.  Also, Ubuntu wasn't
> entirely FOSS last I checked and SuSE was and wasn't at various times.
>
> (I had to double-check Fedora because the Fedora Project looks like a
> stand-alone project host at first glance, but now I'm pretty sure
> there is only RedHat and no project host corporation.  That's quite a
> marketing achievement.)
>
> 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.

David Lang