Re: [tlug] GPL vs. paid version and ethics

[Shmuel Fomberg <shmuelfomberg@example.com>]

 

> So, does a hobbyist need multi-threaded query execution? Or he can do with

> the simple mechanism?

You're implying an open source license is just for hobbyists?

Even in commercial environments there are good reasons to prefer open
source. I've written long complex scripts to patch behaviour for some of
my clients because they're reliant on a closed source system: a feature
we need isn't there, it is easy to add, but the vendor give us a large
quote and a 2-month lead time to add it on. We need it before the
futures contracts expire in 10 days time.

A similar situation with bugs: when a bug affects us, we're highly
motivated to fix it; to the vendor it is just one of many that they have
to prioritize to decide with of their future releases to target it for.
I've had to spend twice as many hours writing little scripts that run
every minute to monitor and fix the effect a bug has than it would've
taken to fix it in the source.

Lets separate between "available code", and "open source".

while open source forces code availability, it is just one property of it.

And if you agree to depend on non-code-available vendor, you either:

trust him completely

or confident that you can work around his bugs, 

or have large-company resources to wait for the vendor to fix bugs

code availability is good for everyone. open source license is... well, a lot of things, and mostly good. 

But if the GPL version is good enough for most of the people, and the EE version is just a speed up for very-large datasets, I don't see a problem with that.

In the company that I work for now (Six Apart) we have a GPL'd CMS (Movable Type) and for Es we sell user groups support, Oracle support and LDAP. 

All these are completely useless to anyone else. 

Shmuel.