Kclug Digest, Vol 39, Issue 9

[Jestin Stoffel]

On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 11:03 -0500, Matthew Copple wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-10-08 at 23:09 -0500, leenix wrote:
> 
> > 2. If I buy a piece of software that is closed-source, the company
> > selling it to me has to support it. If something is wrong with it,
> > they'll fix it, because that's where they make their money.
> > 
> 
> I picked this up off /. just in time for this discussion:
> 
> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071008-when-google-acquisitions-go-wrong-the-disappointing-story-of-urchin.html

In an ideal world, a discontinued product like this would open it's code
with a FOSS license like the GPL.  Unfortunately, even though google is
a very FOSS friendly company, they don't want to have development
continued on a competing product.  It seems this is true even/especially
if it's a product they now own.  I've heard of several good products
that ended this way.