

Building a $36.5 million business with open source software - paltman
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-studionow/index.html

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chargrilled
This article is just plain awful:

"- Avoid the General Product License (GPL)." in the introduction sets the
tone. It's an article about Open Source Software and you don't even know the
name of one of the biggest licenses?

"Coming from backgrounds primarily in enterprise software, which meant
Microsoft® .NET and C#, as well as Oracle and Java™ technology, it was obvious
that we needed to choose something different. No one wanted to spend money on
licensing and managing compliance to licensing."

Java has a _huge_ OSS ecosystem and the JVM is free as in beer. The idea that
their technical choice came down to "Python or Ruby" seems to me like they'd
already decided to go with one and then had to rationalise.

I stopped reading after that.

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harrisreynolds
I didn't know Developerworks still existed. After this article, I wish it
didn't.

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nitrogen
I don't know the history of developerWorks, but there are articles on the web
site detailing Linux kernel internals that I've found useful, so I hope it
doesn't go away.

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skrebbel
Wait - is this special? Don't hundreds of companies do this?

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aidenn0
Judging by their track record, the fact that AOL paid $36.5M for a company
doesn't mean the company was worth that...

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alecco
> Approach the community with an attitude of contributing back.

Refreshing.

