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.”

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