On Wednesday, October 15, 2003, at 06:34 AM, Vince Hoang wrote:
Cautious vendors that are concerned with intellectual property do not need avoid using open-source until a legal precedence is set with the GPL. For lots of GPL software, there is usually a BSD equivalent.
The folks at Lavanet have created another company that has developed a rather impressive and well-designed spam appliance aimed at the Corporate sector. It is based on Open Source software. Because they have added proprietary tweaks to the product, it is *bsd based. Consequently, the changes they have made remain "theirs."
If intellectual property is not of paramount importance, then GPL software is viable. It all comes down to how one wishes to differentiate his product/service. If service/support/implementation are the strengths and revenue-generators of a company, then using GPL and releasing any tweaks is more than acceptable. If one wishes to differentiate his product with coding expertise, then starting with less restrictive code is probably the better idea.
-Vince
--scott
