On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 6:36 PM, Magnus Olsen magnus@greatlord.com wrote:
One thing more do not forget that steven is starting paying some of the devs in ReactOS , he and fireball are trying to go Commercial so they trying shutdown ReactOS and make it into project codename unros. This info is not public and only few devs known of it, and of cures he will deny this.
Now this is just not right. I've talked to several developers off list about my plans to make a ReactOS product. Never once has it included anything about shutting down ReactOS. Thats just not feasible even if I wanted to. I want ReactOS to be a success. I want it to get respect from the Free Software community. I kept people in the dark about my plans because of legal reasons. I was leaving my former employer and being offered a severance. The company I started is making competing products to my former employer. Legally if my former boss knew ahead of time that I was going to start a competitor it could have been viewed by his share holder as a failure of his fiduciary duty by knowing paying someone that was going to start a competitor.
Since that has ended I've been very clear about the project and its business plan. A ReactOS product called the BordeauxOS for VMs mainly targeting the Mac platform as its the only major platform with market share that does not include OEM licenses for Windows so using ReactOS instead of Windows for legacy applications would be a cost savings for Bordeaux customers.
The only thing even remotely like what you describe above that I have done is I asked developers if they would be willing to license their code gplv2 or later and if we could slowly work to convert the tree so at some future date. If I needed to convince investors that their investment would be secure I could say "We have the option of release under a slightly more restrictive Free Software license the GPLv3". Where ReactOS would still be GPLv2 or later, BordeauxOS would have the option of releasing some or all of its patches under either license. Fireball had nothing to do with that discussion and it was mainly with 1 major contributor to which I am not aware you were privy to the discussion. I didn't ask it publicly because I know how heated the discussion was lastime and I figured I would start with the most major contributors first. I don't want to see ReactOS change anything (except maybe adopt git =P), I want it to still be GPLv2. I want fireball to still be in charge, all I want is to build a business where we can pay people to work on the parts that don't get the love they need so it will be usable and not just a hobby OS.