Jason,
a few cents of mine, if you don't mind.

Working for a company which makes most of its revenue in licenses, I would
like to spend some words of open source software.

While Open Source may have many advantages, it also has disadvantages.
While there are many fanatics, people defending the Bazar and so on, most of
the people contributing to open source are students or idealists, who don't
need to earn money at the moment.
As soon, as they get a real job, the usually quit their OS-efforts and the
OS-project dies (as often seen in the past).
IBO is a license-revenue driven component suite. Its quality and also the
creativity it contains are worth every penny you're charging. And knowing
you make a living on it, I am sure you won#t drop it that fast as other free
projects I have seen.
I don't know how the discussion came to OS-IBO, but it is a totally useless
subject. You developed more than 90% of IBO, and you need money to do this.
So you charge it, and everybody here in this list has either paid it, or has
a trustware-license for free. They already agreed to your license. Trying to
force you to change something now (after ageeing already to pay for it)
would be respectless and also indiscutable. So, there is no pressure at all
to change something.
While Marathon may be open sourced, it does not affect IBO at all. Marathon
uses IBO, but doesn't contain it. So Patrick is free to open the source to
it (without IBO, only references to it). Everybody, who has the source will
need to either purchase IBO or use the Trial-download to compile it.
Heck, they need to purchse Delphi, too. Nobody expects Borland to open
source Delphi, only because Marathon was Open Sourced.

Calm down a bit and enjoy the fact, that there is an outstanding tool now
more or less freely available for IB/FB....people will be able to use it
freely, and also read the source....If they want to compile it, they have to
have both, Delphi (payid for) and IBO (paid for)...and partick himself can
do a compile with his own licensed version of IBO. No need to defend
yourself at all.

Nick Josipovic
Corporate Market Intelligence

Phone: ++49 6227 762945

> -----Original Message-----
>