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

david at lang.hm david at lang.hm
Fri Oct 15 12:52:06 NZDT 2010


On Fri, 15 Oct 2010, MJ Ray wrote:

> david at 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


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