http://www.guardiandigital.com), which is a secure Web and e-business server based on Guardian Digital’s EnGarde Linux distribution and Zelerate’s AllCommerce application. Then something really funny happened (and not funny “ha, ha”) — Zelerate went out of business and started liquidating their company.
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Something very interesting happened this month. We were working on a product review of the Guardian Digital Linux Lockbox (http://www.guardiandigital.com), which is a secure Web and e-business server based on Guardian Digital’s EnGarde Linux distribution and Zelerate’s AllCommerce application. Then something really funny happened (and not funny “ha, ha”) — Zelerate went out of business and started liquidating their company.
Something very interesting happened this month. We were working on a product review of the Guardian Digital Linux Lockbox (http://www.guardiandigital.com), which is a secure Web and e-business server based on Guardian Digital’s EnGarde Linux distribution and Zelerate’s AllCommerce application. Then something really funny happened (and not funny “ha, ha”) — Zelerate went out of business and started liquidating their company.
Now, in theory, this should not have made any difference. After all, Zelerate’s AllCommerce is a completely open source application, licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL. So no matter what happened to Zelerate, the source code for AllCommerce will always be out there, available to anyone that wants or needs to modify it. Zelerate going out of business should not have made any difference — again, in theory.
Unfortunately, however, I wasn’t sure that the availability of the source code was sufficient to warrant running a review of a product that was based on software created and supported by a company that is out of business. So, despite a tremendous feeling of disappointment, I was compelled to yank the review.
This whole experience got me thinking harder about the relationship between the commercial world and the open source world and the differences that exist between them. Can a corporation really initiate an open source project?
There is indeed a difference between a project that is Open Source (as defined by the Open Source Initiative’s “Open Source Definition,” or OSD) and a project that springs…
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