Hi Augustin,
The argument that "Jess is owned by the U.S. Government, and therefore
the U.S. would benefit most if Jess were given away for free" sounds
superficially convincing -- unless you work for a company that sells a
commercial rule engine, in which case you have a fairly hard time
understanding why your company being run out of business is good for
the country.
Although Jess's licensing policies may seem rather complex, they're
really not, and are being improved all the time. Feedback is
welcomed. The most important features are that academic and government
users can have Jess -- including the source code -- at no
cost. Commercial users worldwide pay a very competitive, negotiable
licensing fee, and do get the source code as well. Granted, obtaining
a Jess license is not as simple as walking into Egghead Software and
laying down your VISA card, but it's actually pretty simple: there is
a form to fill out, which you have to sign and FAX or mail back. Other
software companies have very similar licenses, actually -- they're
often printed on the envelope the CD comes in, or on the web page
where you download the software -- but they aren't obligated by law,
as we are, to make sure you've read it.
I think Agustin Gonzalez wrote:
[Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
> Hi everybody,
> I wondered if this topic has been discussed before, I am sure it has.
> However, I want to bug a little bit with it even if it has. I think it would
> be very beneficial for Jess and the software development community if Jess
> is put under the open source code licensing.
>
> For instance, I worked in a for-profit company where we almost used Jess to
> integrate it with EJB (I integrated Jess with EJB back in April 2000, I
> wrote a toy pricing engine demo where the rules where evaluated with Jess
> using a session EJB bean to model a product catalog). Jess was attractive
> but we did not use it mainly because the complicated licensing policies. I
> think we would have definitely used it if it had been open source. Where
> this had been the case, maybe by this time they may have been an open source
> connector from Jess to EJB.
>
> My .2 cents on the Jess open source discussion.
>
> --
> Agustin Gonzalez, Ph.D.
> (512) 248-9839
>
> P.S. I think the obvious response to my email will be: Jess is owned by the
> US government. My response to this would be: the US would benefit more if
> Jess is owned by the US developers instead.
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, send the words 'unsubscribe jess-users [EMAIL PROTECTED]'
> in the BODY of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED], NOT to the
> list (use your own address!) List problems? Notify [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
---------------------------------------------------------
Ernest Friedman-Hill
Distributed Systems Research Phone: (925) 294-2154
Sandia National Labs FAX: (925) 294-2234
Org. 8920, MS 9012 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PO Box 969 http://herzberg.ca.sandia.gov
Livermore, CA 94550
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, send the words 'unsubscribe jess-users [EMAIL PROTECTED]'
in the BODY of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED], NOT to the
list (use your own address!) List problems? Notify [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
