RE: Open Source FLEXlm?

["Company, Paul J." <paul.company@unisys.com>]

My original post "is there a open source FLEXlm" has been
turned into "what should be free or not". Stop please, or create a new
subject. 

The reason I want a license manager is not to control access to software,
but to have another tool to manage it. A tool to gather data so I can
make better informed desicions. For example, I'd like to be able
to answer the following questions (which I believe FLEXlm can answer):
(1) Who is using gcc-2.8.1?
    That allows me to upgrade people who need it.
(2) What's the most used piece of software in our company?
    This allows me to focus our resources in researching the right tools.
(3) How many different software packages are we actually using?
(4) And sure, control access to certain applications, for security reasons
etc.
(5)...(6)...

I think Open Source is popular because it offers an alternative to the
horrible software that is out there. Sometime I feel like I only have two
choices,
(1) pay money for a mediocre piece of software, or
(2) use a free open source software that's almost as good and put up with
the lack of functional, support, documentation, which by the way, only
plagues
some open source software. I have open source software that is better in
every
respect than commercial software! Good enough product, that's free. That's 
why it's popular. Not mentioning all the other advantages of open source,
better/faster debugging, better/faster solution paths, better/faster
development...

-----Original Message-----
From: Yves Dorfsman [mailto:dorfsmay@cuug.ab.ca]
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2000 9:19 PM
To: sage-members@usenix.org
Subject: Re: Open Source FLEXlm?



On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Joe Pruett wrote:

> cygnus has a position statement somewhere that lays out their line between
> should be free and doesn't need to be free.  they think that compilers
> should be free, but development environments don't need to be.  i think
> they gave some other examples, but i only remember it from their code
> fusion product.

So in other words, the software they need should be free, the software
they sell need not to be free !!!

In my, very personal, opinion, the only people that can say that a piece
of software *should* be free, are the same people that are writing the
said piece of software, and giving it for free.

The argument that the OS, or the compiler should be free, can be hold for
any piece of software used by a large number of people (development
environment, editor, internet browser, word processor, etc....). A lot of
people need them, so it should be free.



Yves.
----
Yves Dorfsman                                        dorfsmay@cuug.ab.ca
                                         http://www.cuug.ab.ca/~dorfsmay