In your view, someone putting out open source software which is incomplete, crippled and only a demo, will make open source look bad and this is something to detest. This is of course true to some extent. But what about someone that publishes bad open source software just because he is a bad developer, without having an open core business model?

Or to look at your argument another way, if someone publishes software you can use without paying and you find it useful, then this is nice and ok, but if someone witholds features you’d like to get for free, then that’s not nice?

Btw, what do you think about something like Red Hat Enterprise Linux? You don’t get it for free, but it is 100% open source, no open core there.

My point is that open core is bad because the proponents try to assert that it is okay to add in a little proprietary code and still pretend you’re open source. Which part of the software is or isn’t useful, or how independent it is architecturally, is a completely different discussion and open core is not defined like that. The harm done to open source is that people are trying to include as “open source” something which doesn’t meet the open source definition.

And the motivation for that argument mostly lies in the belief that open source has tremendous value in itself. Even crappy software released as open source has the potential of becoming better (like Linux v0.2), and in any case you have total freedom to control your destiny with it. With proprietary software you don’t have that, and this is irrespective of how many nice and useful features a company gives you for free.

To put it another way, there are proprietary software companies like Microsoft and Oracle and Apple that produce really nice and useful proprietary software, a lot of which you can even use for free. This can be considered nice in many ways, it is not crippleware in many cases (Internet Explorer), etc. It just isn’t open source. (And they are not claiming it to be.)

And I don’t make any value judgement on whether this is good or bad. As someone said to me: “Priority one: Ensure you’re giving value” – and I agree with that. This is not a customer value argument, it is a fight over the value of the Open Source brand (which *is* damaged when people start to associate “Open Source” with “substandard shareware”.

Dave.

If the open stuff is insufficient, that would be another matter. Particularly vile, we’ve seen situations where the open stuff was crippled and limping, and not really useful to anyone, yet the commercial stuff had proprietary solutions, fixes, and extensions to make it really useful. That, I think, is totally “faux-pen.” Where a company harvests whatever contributions the community can manage, without giving back what they create to complete, this is “faux.” Poetically, it generally kills the community as well, so we have at least the revenge that the harvest dries up (geese and golden eggs might be the better metaphor).