Advertising "open core" software

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 04:30:10PM +0200, Joerg Simon wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 15. April 2010 13:41:38 schrieb Nelson Marques:
> > We are full of load, it's a waste of manpower to
> > support stuff that comes in a pesky way.
> 
> This wording is a bit unlucky for all the people who put a lot effort into this
> - and not a valid point!

This talking point was developed openly here on the Marketing list,
and I appreciate the time that Robert put into packaging this 100%
open source solution.  And that in fact is *part* of the success story
-- the ability to have a feature in Fedora that will be helpful to
system administrators and users, because a contributor stepped up to
do the necessary work.

Fedora also has an ISV SIG that is there to help ISVs understand the
path to getting code into Fedora, and we have never discriminated
there on the basis of business model as far as I know.  I would hate
to see the Fedora Project become known as hostile to ISVs, especially
when we are making inroads to more stable releases that might
incidentally be more hospitable.

Robert gave a full accounting of the nature of the code in Fedora, and
the decision to promote it was part of our open, transparent process
here on the list and in Marketing meetings several months ago.  If we
want to talk about placing further restrictions around that process,
we can do so for the F-14 time frame.

The freedom of this code is not in question as far as I can tell,
especially in light of Robert's post about the details.  If there were
artificial limits on using the software, that would certainly be
against our freedom stance and would call licensing in to question.
But Robert has confirmed there's no such problem.

Elsewhere Jan mentioned tweaking the name we use in the details of our
release notes and announcements, which is a good point.  We can fix
the appropriate places on the wiki and our final release notes to
effect that change.

> > > We should not discourage the idea to have a good symbioses with other
> > > vendors. The Framework is working and can be used with all Features that
> > > a Fedora User is able to use.
> > It seems to me that this is a very grey area.
> 
> it is pretty clear it is legal in Fedora - it works without the need
> of additional components - it is Open Source - you can do a fork!
> 
> Please Marketing People do not make the same mistake as with Fedora
> Electronic Lab features - last release!

Thanks for this reminder Joerg.  We don't want to do that.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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