At 11:04 PM 29-07-00 -0600, you wrote:

>At 04:58 PM 7/29/00 -0500, you wrote:
> >There seems to be two groups here. Group one, wants to create a company
> >called "NewCo". They are asking for venture capital to get going. This to me
> >implys that they want to start an actual business and make money. Certainly
> >nothing wrong with that.
> >
> >Group two, seems to want IB completely open-sourced as a "community"
> >project. This is obviously not a company for profit.
>
>Right on the head. The code, documentation, build scripts etc should belong
>to the community. If a company wants to make money providing printed
>manuals, better books, pre-built systems, consulting or support more power
>to them. This Is why I suggested a php type of a manual where the actual
>users get input as to what goes into the docs.
>----------------------------------------------

That is it, EXACTLY. There are not "three" camps, there are two: Inprise,
which is holding out on the pieces to actually get IB Open Source up and
running; and the rest (including the NewCo initiative) which embraces the
whole OS concept and says "the product is the WHOLE product and without all
of it being Open Source, it can't be said to be following Open Source rules".

The benefit we would have had from ISC (as the plan was) is that Inprise
would hand over ALL rights, including all the technical props and
copyrights, making ISC free to Open Source the lot - including the on-line
docs. Dale Fuller has now made sure that can't happen.

But PLEASE BE CLEAR that Open Source does not transfer copyright - not for
source code, not for written material, unless the licence explicitly does
so. That means you can download the docs ** if ** Inprise makes them
available but you can't publish them as manuals.

Make sure that YOU as developers clearly comment and claim copyright on
your own behalf for every piece of code you submit to the trees and for
every piece of documentation you write.

To put Paul Gallagher straight, ISC's business model was to make revenue
from publishing manuals and distributions, from which it would fund R &
D. I'm curious to know how Paul thinks a crucial software like a database
could be kept under credible R & D control except through a company that
has the resources to pay a salary? Don't throw Linux in as an example. If
you break a piece of the OS, you go back a version and wait for a fix. If
you break a piece of a RDBMS, you can break everything.

Helen