[consult] Call for Community Consultation - Software Repository

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>>>>> "michael" == michael dillon <michael.dillon at bt.com> writes:
    >> > ARIN should be neutral as to license or indeed whether there is any 
    >> > license at all. ...
    >> 
    >> Concur.  ARIN should be liberal in what it accepts.

    michael> Just how does liberal ARIN distribute commercial software on its
    michael> server without running afoul of the law? Sell it, I suppose. Or

  Hi, you have made the mistake of assuming that commercial is the
opposite of open source.   It's not, they are two orthogonal ideas along
different axis. Free-beer vs free-speech.  The correct term for software
which is not open source is proprietary. 
  I know that you've been around long enough to know this distinction.

  IBM, Sun, Mysql and Redhat *sell* (i.e. do commercial transactions)
for open source software.  Apache is free like speech, but when you buy
it from Sun, it's not free as in beer.  Meanwhile, Microsoft, Adobe, Sun,
and others gives away (as in free-beer) lots of software that is not
free as in speech. 

  If the software is free-as-in-beer, as fits within ARIN's mandate, I
see no reason why ARIN should not make it available.   For instance,
maybe someone has an HP-OpenView plugin that does whois lookups on
remote nodes, and it's binary-only (because it includes HP-Openview
components which are royalty-free, but not open-source), and can only be
used with a licensed copy of HP-Openview.  I think that ARIN might want
to host such a thing.  Maybe someone even sells a support contract on it.

- -- 
Michael Richardson <mcr at xdsinc.net>
Simtone Corporation, Ottawa, Canada
Personal: http://www.sandelman.ca/mcr/ 


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