[asterisk-users] Corporate Feedback to OSS (was: Re: Mushtaq Ahmed is out of the office.)

[Matthew Rubenstein]

On Sat, 2007-07-07 at 08:39 -0500,
asterisk-users-request at lists.digium.com wrote:
> Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2007 12:02:53 -0600
> From: Stephen Bosch <posting at vodacomm.ca>
> Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] Mushtaq Ahmed is out of the office.
> To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
>         <asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
> Message-ID: <468E83CD.1070703 at vodacomm.ca>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> Wayne wrote:
> > I was wondering where 3Com were getting all the new ideas from for
> their 
> > phone system ;-p
> > 
> > Cats out of the bag now I guess :)
> 
> The price of open source is that the commercial outfits are free to
> rip
> off ideas without paying for them.
> 
> But hey -- competition is good, right?

	Competition is good, one benefit of OSS pressure on
commercial/proprietary competitors to improve their products which lead
investment.

	Cooperation is also good. Public knowledge that corporations are in the
community helps us know where to look for GPL software they secretly
use, or just how they get some valuable ideas from which they profit
(profit from us, usually). So it's easier to convince them to explicitly
feed back into the OSS. Either just user feedback, or actual investment
in testing, further development, or even GPL'ing their own proprietary
tech into the community.

	So now it's time that 3Com hears from us, and we hear back, that we're
all "coopeting" together. If they don't explicitly contribute soon, that
bad community attitude will be a clue for some examination of their
products for included GPL code and GPL violations, or just some bad
press for being merely "takers" with their $billion budgets.


> -Stephen-