Yesterday I visited Rob Conery's blog and the post about commercial SubSonic support options made me think again about the open source philosophy. In my opinion Rob must decide in which category of Open Source is SubSonic located.

• Is it a real open source project as defined by OSI
• Is it an open source project in a way ASP.NET MVC is

If SubSonic is in the first category, I believe NHibernate is in that category, Ayende’s commerical support offering is not acceptable. Since bug fixes are included in that offering and Rob or Ayende are commiters that would not sound right to the community.

If SubSonic is in second category and Rob decide that SubSonic is open source but main official release is maintained and owned only by him or a company that commericial support offering would be ok.

Perfect Examples

Following OSS examples are very well suited to define my objection

Linus Torvalds does not offer bug fixes as a commerical support for the official Linux kernel. He does not because he is the main authority, and the unpaid authority, who decides if a bug fix or patch be applied to the official release of the kernel. (I do no think he has the time to review all submitted patches but he in a way organized the inner workings) But we all know that Suse and RedHat offer bug fixes and patches for their own distribution, which is understandable and valid. I do not mind the way RedHat or Suse patches and bug fixes are applied to the official kernel releases.

Another example is the Mozialla Foundation. If NHibernate had a non profit foundation as Mozilla and the foundation offered commercial support via kind of Mozilla Corporation that would be OK too. And I want to remind you that Mozilla like foundations do not distribute share profit to any third parties.

Questions

1. As far as I know NHibernate is not copyrighted to anybody or any entity. So may other contributors claim copyright for the bugs they introduce which may cause some complications?
2. The material itself and the functionality that material provides is not paid in OSS projects. Does offering commercial bug fix support right for the official release of the project cause the material to have some sort of monetary value, since fixing bugs is commercialized which means introducing bugs may be commercialized too?
3. What if I, as a non commiter to NHibernate project, wanted to offer commercial bug fix support too? Do you think that project leads would allow me to be a committer just beacuse of that even if I'm not qualified to be a commiter? Shall I interpret Ayende as monopoly in NHibernate community context? Don't you think that being a virtual/possible monopoly conflicts with the open source?
4. If an OSS is not copyrighted to anybody or any entity, do you think that OSS project leads hold legal rights to decide whom to let in or kick out?

CodeProject

The sample Ruby code has no syntax errors. What does the code through lines 3-5 mean? And what is printed to the screen/console?

Any Suggestions ? 

class Sample
  attr_writer :name
  attr_reader :name do
     "Mr. " + @name
  end
end

s = Sample.new
s.name = "Ali"
puts s.name

Evolution of new web technologies directed enterprises to web based software solutions. New tecnologies and frameworks offer lots features for web based solutions but entreprises still need some sort of rich client back office software to access backend data or perform specialized and complicated business tasks.

Pragma BackOffice (PragmaBO) is an effort to provide extensible rich client framework for enterprise level back office solutions based on Microsoft platform (Windows, .NET , C#, MS SQL Server 2005/Express ). Main features of PragmaBO are More...

Agile yazılım geliştirme yöntemlerinden biri olarak oldukça popüler bir yaklaşım olan ICONIX'e genel bir bakış sağlamak için oluşturduğum sayfa burada .

For a while I am thinking about the Microsoft's support to open source projects. Some news that attracted my attention to this issue were

• Foundation of CodePlex, open source project hosting web site of Microsoft
• Ms-PL license developed by Microsoft  
• Release of .NET Framework libraries  source code . Read more
• Release of ASP .NET MVC source code. Read more

Heritage

Microsoft has developed very successfull technologies through history. COM/ActiveX formed a good baseline for MS platforms and related runtimes like MTS, COM+ and DCOM were a must for enterprise level application development targeted at MS platforms. VB was a fantastic programming language, even I've never written single line of VB code I remember how my co-workers rocked with VB, ASP was not perfect but it was, actually it still is, productive and easy to learn and VC++ powered with MFC was the programming language of choice for lower level software development. All these runtimes, frameworks and languages were not perfect, but they did succeeded in helping software developers to produce valuable software. However some of these technologies required software developers to have some sort of geek talent. For example it was very difficult for a regular software developer to write some sort of event sink COM code or programmatically configure the DCOM environment. I think Microsoft has learned more than we expected from the history I briefly tried to explain. Now we are at the age of .NET and related technologies and personally I expect less hesitation than the previous experiences we all ran through.
More...