[TAG] (forw) Re: when is an open source license open source?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ashlee Vance (ashlee.vance at theregister.co.uk):

> Gosh> didn't you give in kinda easy?
> http://rhx.redhat.com/rhx/catalog/productdetail.jspa?productId=1002
> SugarCRM is the market-leading commercial open source customer relationship
> management (CRM) application.

Well, I had never noticed that, so I didn't comment on it.

What originally brought the matter to my attention was attending the
RHEL5 product launch, the first time that RHX was mentioned, seeing
the dozen-odd initial offerings shown on the slide describing RHX as
offering open source applications, and noticing that around half of
those listed offerings were very clearly NOT open source.  I chatted
with Red Hat's CTO, about a half-hour after the presentation, and he
agreed with my assessment that it was inevitable that RHX would offer
proprietary applications, but that the literature needed to be
corrected.  He promised to pass the word along.

Time passed, and I started to see press releases -- which repeated and
furthered the misrepresentations I saw on Launch Day.  I checked out the 
http://www.redhat.com/rhx/ entry page and _some_ of the subpages of
http://rhx.redhat.com/ .  I certainly didn't dig down into _all_ of the
subpages; my focus was on the pages people were most likely to encounter
soonest.

So, I never even bothered to visit the product-spepcific page(s) about
SugarCRM.  (I didn't _really_ want to read about SugarCRM, after all;
it's terrible, badly coded bloatware, pitched by a bunch of pushy,
small-time hucksters.)

Well, anyway, damn.  I spoke too soon, it seems.  

At least the misstatement on the _main_ pages has been removed -- which
was the basis of my comment that RH had done the right thing -- even
though I mistakenly assumed they'd done a clean sweep.  Maybe I should
ask RH to add a "Representation on this page are those of the software
vendor, and not of Red Hat, Inc." disclaimer?  What's your own opinion,
Ashlee?  I'm more than a bit tired and too darned busy with other
things, but can get back to this matter soon.