On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 15:17, Shachar Shemesh wrote: > > > I brought that example up. He was not impressed. Apparently, Clalit > went, succesfully, through a court proceeding to enforce such a > settelment without even having the actual source mentioned in a contract. >
There are two issues: Writing Open Source like, or using it. Why does Gilon wonder if he should be developing open source code in-house? Why does he think he need to accept the "Social Reasons" behind it? I think the discussion is somewhat off track. As an organization, Klalit can rely on OSS to gain some advantages, mainly: commitment to Open Standards, Interoperability, Reliability, TCO and Security. If this are not good enough reasons, then he probably should stick with proprietary code. In respect to developing in-house, As far as having access to the code per se, what will he then do with the source code? And why this is better than actually developing OSS in house? I don't see the benefits. He got himself involved in an expensive court case to gain what? Is Gilon going to continue developing and maintaining it himself or ask someone else to do it? No matter what it'll be probably cheaper to buy and migrate to another solution. When "Open Source" the worst thing that can happen is that the original developer will give up and abandon the code. Thing is, if it was a popular code, or of interest to others, they can continue from that point. And still it is unlikely when we discuss mature and proven projects which Klalit might be interested in. But this is really beside the point as far as I can see, the true discussion is about the topics mentioned above (commitment to Open Standards, Interoperability, Reliability, TCO and Security). Source code availability is only interesting in the context of developers communities and part of a development model and it seldom relevant to the end user. BTW Talking of health services, we on whatsup, covered at least one case of an hospital that got involved with OSS development and seem to be very happy with the results and benfites. See here (Hebrew) what were thier impressions on adopting and getting involved with OSS devlopment, contributing back etc.: http://whatsup.org.il/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1405 a case study orignaly published by LinuxMedNews. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]