I'm sorry Alexander that your forum thread got hi-jacked by this old conflict. There is a old conflict between Eugene, that sells eCS russian software, and some other Russian developer groups.
We are merry and fun community of users
....but sadly I need to reply hard on this issues and try to explain a more philosophical point of view about Open Source to Eugene.
Eugene, it is hard to discuss with you because you don't support the Open Source model, and sometime it is hard to understand your english. (my personal opinion) Money is important, and developers needs to be paid, but that does not mean that it is obligatory to produce close source software and charge for license. To me close source software today is future abandonware... because everybody will leave to be an OS/2 user in one way or other ..... or do you think we are going to leave this life alive?
Selling license is a 90's model that is getting close to the end. Selling software in commodities like Operating Systems, Office Suites, Web Application servers and a lot of other software sales are getting complicated because of the options you have in the market.
Eugene, you offer a library that is freeware (not open source), and someday you may change your mind, you may start charging money for it, or even someday you may die (like everybody here) and all your software will became abandonware. Instead the open source software has the possibility to live forever without depending on the developer. Please try to embrace the open source model. Thanks to open source we have firefox, OpenOffice, XWorkplace..... yes, the effort of the developers is important, but if we didn't have Firefox open sourced in the first place today we will not have a browser at all. Money is important, but this is a community, not a marketplace anymore.
....when you made efforts to collect money for new fraud (port network drivers, etc).
Eugene, it seems that you don't understand that this kind of comments hurts you instead of others. We all know the issues on both sides (eCo Software vs Russian developers) and I'm sick of that. We are not here to define who is good or bad, we only discuss things. Eugene, if you have problems that hurts your business, please start with legal actions and please stop this.
Returning to open source. Open Source is the only way we have to reduce the #1 issue of this community.
The #1 issue is that this is orphan platform, IBM dumped us, and nobody has OS/2 source code available to keep improving it components. I want to this platform to live forever and evolve in time, while other just want drivers, other just want their things working, other just wants to make money and other just wants their business software running. On which side are you?
Open Source will set the platform free, once we get our freedom, we can turn from a community to market again, and you can sell all your products to get millions. But right now, if we want this platform to endure in long future we need to collaborate, and open source is a formal way to do it with clear rules, and we all need to put the shoulder.
Or.... we can try to squeeze the last dollar to the 400 (?) OS/2 community users left? Should we turn OS2World under paid subscription?
....oh.. that was what killed WarpCity.... I should stop digging into the past, I may wake a
Balrog