Mixing Free and Proprietary Software: Not a Rosy Future

"The article was an opinion piece by Steve Harris, senior director for open source products at Novell in issue 78 of Linux User & Developer magazine. Sadly it's not yet available on-line and I don’t honestly know if it will be. If it is I'll post a comment with a link here so you can read it for yourself.

Nothing new under the sun

As I said, the idea that software stacks will become a mixture of free and proprietary products is nothing new. Indeed lots of people are already using such stacks. Personally I believe that once freedom is introduced into a “market place” it will become harder to suppress until eventually it becomes the dominant licencing strategy. This is evident in the fact that a company like Novell not only bought a free software company (SuSE), but bought into the free software philosophy -- well partly anyway. So while proprietary software may not entirely die out (more's the pity) I feel (and hope) it will become the de-facto NON-standard way of licencing software."

Complete Story

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