I just read an article from O'Reilly on "working withou copyleft"...
http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/policy/2001/12/12/transition.html
"We have received more corporate contributions, which generally are submitted by experienced developers and are of a high quality, on projects without copyleft."
It would be nice to have some numbers on this issue! I am wondering how much contribution has been done by developers of jabber before and after the foundation of Jabber Inc. This would be a nice research topic!
As I was looking around the jabber java applet this will be my example:
1. It was written under josl by David Scott who has an email address at Webb Inc. (Investor of Jabber Inc.)
2. There has been no development on it for more than a year, although there are still open issues.
3. Some month ago Jabber Inc. released a java webclient allowing http polling which could be an enhanced version of the former javaApplet.
4. Jabber Inc. released a JEP and *not* the code for the http polling issue, describing what their main problems were.
5. Nobody picked up this issue until today. Peter Millard replied to a question of mine with the words:
"Not yet :) I'm hoping someone will get motivated and write up an open-source implementation. The protocol and approach that Jabber, Inc. used is documented in this information JEP: http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0025.html"
6. I have the impression (maybe again very *subjective*) that nobody really *wants* to pick up this issue, because of the fear that his code might go straightly into Jabber Inc.'s code and still not be released!
Well, the real issue from an economical perspective is: How many jobs are created by open source and which license is best suited?
Still a nice research topic!
