Bart
I am very keen to promote the use of OpenACS within the company. We are a retail solutions provider with our core products being in J2EE. However, the 'powers that be' are disillusioned with the time it takes to develop a J2EE solution. I have proposed OACS as an alternative for the web based reporting and maintenance apps that we develop and this upcoming project is being seen as an opportunity to show what OACS can do.
As you say, we would ensure that any work on OpenACS or any work on packages released under the GPL would be made available to the community, but there are times when a specialist package developed to work with our Java based EPOS solution would need to remain proprietry. This approach would allow the OpenACS community to benefit from an increased pool of commercial developers which in itself is not a bad thing.
I don't wish to offend anyone. I am grateful for the huge contibutions made under the GPL and on a personal basis I will release my work to the community (if I ever manage to produce anything the community wants) but I feel that adoption by some commercial organisations would be restricted if they cannot produce a mix of proprietry and GPL'd code.
By the way using TCl Dev Kit is an intersting solution to IP protection.
Steve
