Welcome to the Oxymoron of the Day.
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| dthacker Jul 11, 2005 1:51 PM EDT |
"We bring those modifications back in like with open source, but we own them and push them to the main product," OpenMFG CEO Ned Lilly says. "This is like a proprietary GPL." I'm not sure what OpenMFG's license fees are like, but it sounds like 1) you buy a license 2) you get the source code 3) anything you do to the code goes back to OpenMFG 4) OpenMFG profits!! Propietary and GPL do not belong in the same sentence. DT |
| tuxtom Jul 11, 2005 5:59 PM EDT |
A business model base on sound reasoning, like that of a paint huffer. |
| number6x Jul 12, 2005 6:25 AM EDT |
This used to be a pretty common practice back in my mainframe days. I have worked on a few systems where the proprietary code was open for viewing by paying customers, but any changes or fixes would belong to the company that owned the code. These were usually highly specialized systems that would, for instance, allow actuarial tables to be used in software an insurance company would use. The clientele would be rather limited and would be using home-grown software on the mainframe. The external proprietary vendor would supply the specialized accounting or actuarial code. Your homegrown code would either feed the vendor's code input, and read the output batch style, or maybe call the program dynamically. Being able to see the vendor's code would really help mesh the two systems together. We would respect their copyright and the licensing agreement and never steal any code. Now and then you might find a bug in their code and benefit the vendor, but usually the purpose of viewing their code was to better bridge the two systems. This was mutually beneficial. I guess that the closest example today would be the many java libraries from Sun. You can browse the code, but you don't own it and you can't change it. If you need it to work differently, you need to sub-class it and override the functionality that you need to change. It is open source, for viewing, but not free software. |
| dinotrac Jul 13, 2005 7:29 AM EDT |
A friend of mine re-sells OpenMFG. To call it Open-Source by any meaningful definition is Just Plain Wrong. The licensing is terrible, the company can be less than responsive and Mr. Ned can be...well, let's just say I could make at least a couple of anatomical references. On the other hand, Once properly customized and installed, the software appears able to do the job well enough to make many a small to mid-sized company happy, and, at least in terms of the ERP universe, is very reasonably priced. Lose some, win some. |
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