a question about open source

[Timber Lee]

Hi,
I little know about protection of use of open source, sometimes I worry about that the developers would stop sharing their open software , for example,Struts does not open anymore. are there anything to protect users?
[ July 14, 2003: Message edited by: Timber Lee ]

[Simon Brown]

Even if the Struts team did in the future change the license from open to closed source, you would still have the current version as open source since that licensing has to still apply. I think that, in effect, a product has to be re-released under a different license, something like branching the codebase.
However, some open source licenses are more protective of rights than others. For example, with GPL (the Gnu Public License), you have to open source any code that depends on a GPL project, so in theory such code cannot be closed up. Others, however, allow people to do what they want. This includes releasing a closed source version of the code, often with just the original copyright statement kept intact.
I'm not an expert in the various open source licenses, but you're pretty safe.

[Timber Lee]

I think using open source is not so safe to some extent. if an application has the frameworks of open source inside it , and need to be upgraded to new version of J2EE, how to do without new version of the framework?

[Simon Brown]

True, but then that's the same for commercial frameworks too. At least with open source you have the code. If the (commercial) third party goes bust or decides to discontinue development then you will have to rewrite your application!

[Ashik Uzzaman]

Timber Lee QUOTED:

I think using open source is not so safe to some extent.

I am offering a quote from May/June 2003 issue of Oracle Magazine. Christophe Job of Oracle Corporation said on Opening Up to Open Source.

If you look at open source today, it is a viable solution to build your IT infrasturcture on top of, which means you can run Linux as your operating system. You can run Apache as your HTTP listener. You can run JBoss as your EJB container, and those all are solutions that actually work. So these things are putting pressure on companies like Oracle to actually raise the bar of what they offer to their customers.

[Simon Brown]

That's a good quote. Did the article mention anything about supporting open source solutions? This is often an issue that leads many people to dismiss open source, rightly or wrongly.

[Ashik Uzzaman]

Dear Simon,
The article was telling about the enterprise solutions quality Oracle offeres and in one point identifed open source as an alternate viable solution. No more...