Today I was flattered by an interview at OpenSource.com the Red Hat community news site.
One misguided fellow made the following comment about MindTouch:
That thing is not open source at all. On their site it says: “Software License: Shared Source”. As far as I know, that is code name for Microsoft quasi-open source licenses which are in conflict with section 6 (and some with 10 also) of open source definition.
What else to expect from ex-Microsofties…. openwashing.
I tried posting a comment, but Mollum is configured to disallow comments that trip it’s spam filter and I couldn’t.
So, here’s the response I was trying to post in reply to the above comment titled “Openwashing”.
Open washing? 🙂
MindTouch Core is released under GPL v2 but some components (MindTouch Dream) are released under Apache. Download here (Core is GPL2 and free). I write about Open Core here, which links to several other posts on the topic.
The gist is, you can think of MindTouch Core as an up-stack app server that is specialized in collaboration. MindTouch 2009/2010 is a commercial product built atop MindTouch Core. MindTouch 2009/2010 is designed to be the killer app for strategic (product and service) documentation.
I’m confident most, if not all readers, readers at OpenSource.com have used MindTouch before. For example, the Mozilla Developer Network is powered by MindTouch. There are many other documentation bases that are powered by MindTouch including those for Zmanda, Fonality, RightScale, Intel, Microsoft, Intuit, ExactTarget, AutoDesk, EMC and many others.
Anyway, GPL v2 and Apache…not open washing. 🙂
Perhaps someone at OpenSource.com can help me post this comment.
Aaron Fulkerson 