Right now we are facing a bigger problem, which is using open source as a reason not to become customers. I certainly won't call those people idiots, as Eric Raymond did. Cmpanies are saying they would rather not oursource their work. They prefer to give a project to internal engineers than to open source developers outside the company. They like the idea of building knowledge in house and outsource the uninteresting stuff.

DS: who else is doing anything similar and what are the differences?

BB: I would be surprised to find too many companies that aren't trying to walk the line between what's proprietary and what isn't. Even Red Hat. Do they give away the source to the server side of the Red Hat network? They shouldn't. I would be hard-pressed to find any company that gave away everything that it wrote. There may be examples of small independent consulting companies who have built a business making modifications to a particular open source package. But I would imagine most companies with aims to have any measure of commercial success are going to look at drawing that line carefully. Drawing it is a form of calculus.

DS: You need fuzzy logic.

BB: Yeah, it's a form of measuring risk versus return. Our decision was based on finding the return wasn't matching the risk and opportunities.

DS: Were you first with this?

BB: Well, VA really made the first move. But I've always been comfortable with the idea that companies are going to close IP. And we've hired engineers with the idea of working on closed IP. It's the only thing that's different is that a few