Open Edition clarification request
AlisdairM
question...
$1000 is a reasonable price for a professional tool that is going to
bring in (hopefullY) significantly more income than that. However, at
the moment Kylix/Linux are unproven as a revenue stream and a lot of
'small guys'/hobbyists will squeal at that price for an evaluation of
the potential.
We are due the Open Edition in a few months time that is intended for
producing GNU Open Soure projects. A worthy contribution to the arena,
and well worth the hobbyists interest.
Looking for a technology-evaluation though, is it permissible to develop
our product with the Open Edition (features permitting!) so long as we
purchase Desktop/Enterprise licenses before we wrap up and ship, or are
we committing any such projects to GNU, even though the source/product
never left the premises.
If the latter, I can bite my tongue on the pricing policy as a necessary
evil. Borland are, after all, a business and not a charity. However,
Kylix as 'shareware' is something rather *more* generous than prevous
releases and as such should offset the price rise in this product
cycle. It should certainly make it somewhat *easier* to evaluate than
Delphi/BCB under Windows even :¬ )
Assuming we are in the clear so far, that just leaves the delay between
shipping the Open edition and the 'pay' editions. Given the above, you
would have to be very anti-business to expect borland to issue a
simulataneous release. After all, some people do appreciate the cache
of being in 'at the start' and paying for the priledge makes it more
meaningful, not less.
I'm an old meany now. I bought Delphi purely on the promise of the
direct marketing and a price I could afford (basic desktop edition!).
Kylix I can wait for, at a price I can afford.
I'll probably put off any Linux purchases until then two. The ideas
seem somehow linked to me :¬ )
AlisdairM
John Kaster (Borland)
> Looking for a technology-evaluation though, is it permissible to develop
> our product with the Open Edition (features permitting!) so long as we
> purchase Desktop/Enterprise licenses before we wrap up and ship, or are
> we committing any such projects to GNU, even though the source/product
> never left the premises.
The Open Edition version can only be used for non-commercial
development, with a GPL license.
This is my current understanding:
The IDE license (not the CLX license) for Open Edition will not allow
commercial
or internal development of non-GPL applications. GPL is only a license
for
distribution, not for development. The IDE (Open Edition EULA) license
disallows using the product for non-GPL development. It requires that
any
source developed with this edition MUST be distributed under the GPL
with source
freely available.
More details on what exactly will be in Kylix Open Edition should be
coming soon. (When it's ready.)
In summary, if you want to develop commercial applications with Kylix,
or make something you develop with Kylix commercial in the future, you
will need to purchase either Desktop Developer or Server Developer (or
some other commercial development license SKU we may produce in the
future).
Followups go to borland.public.kylix.opensource