Acknowledging that Caldera's plan for per-seat licensing may
"anger the zealots," Evan Leibovitch writes that Caldera's plan may
actually work and that "the self-appointed Linux purity police"
should applaud Caldera's moves as a show of diversity in the
community.
"The new Caldera plan--which requires users to purchase a
license (at at least $59 each) for every desktop running OpenLinux
3.1--runs counter to the conventional wisdom that says that every
Linux OS CD-ROM should able to be copied freely or loaded on
multiple systems without extra licensing."
"It's a risky move, but one that I neither hold in contempt nor
deem doomed to failure. Caldera, for better or worse, is
positioning itself as the company best able to mix the best of open
source and proprietary code."
"Rather than booing the company, the Linux community should
cheer the fact that the Linux spectrum allows such diversity. At
one end we have distributions such as Debian, which closely track
current releases and don't consider any non-free code as part of
the collection. At the other, Caldera not only allows but welcomes
proprietary programs as integral parts of what it calls the
OS."
