Thanks! You’re right. “to remove copyrights” should be replaced with “to offer relaited paid services”.

And now Rick chimes in

Closed source development almost always produces more compelling applications, faster development, and provides a better customer experience.

I am so grateful that EE is not open source for exactly this reason.  I like that the development community is relatively small.  After working on projects with both Zen Cart and OS Commerce in the past six months and HATING both experiences, I’d much rather pay a license fee in exchange for the ease of use and customer support.

The ridiculous thing about many open source projects is that after the project has been going for awhile, pressure comes down on the devs to keep developing even after their personal funds they used to start the project have dried up, which leads to the devs placing loud requests for monetary donations from the community—sometimes almost to the point of demanding them—which can’t help but beg the question of if they expect everyone to pay for it, why did they make it open source in the first place?  This has occurred in every single open source community I’ve ever been part of.

I definitely am of the opinion that open source can be a good business, and that you can have an open source project and get paid to code, but not with a “the community will support us” attitude.  You have to have a sound business plan, and run it as a business, not a charity.  Plenty of examples exist.

As out of scope as the LAMP example may have been, we can find some of those examples right there.
Linux - Red Hat Enterprise Linux anyone?
MySQL - sure the community version is free & open source, but the MySQL AB company is much more than just a community project.
PHP - How about Zend? True, Zend is not PHP and doesn’t own PHP; however, the original creators of PHP founded the Zend company and both still largely contribute to the PHP project, so there is a very strong tie there.

So before anyone gets too carried away with reasoning that because our LAMP stack is open source, applications we build should be open source as well, let’s not forget that a good deal of that stack is built by and supported by commercial enterprises.  Look at practically any major open source project that has penetration in the professional sector, and I guarantee that chances are there is a commercial enterprise behind the project supporting it. Otherwise the project most likely wouldn’t still be able to exist out of the goodness of the community.

Open source is a nice philosophy, but unless you combine it with sound business practices, it just won’t work for very long.  The goodness of the community usually knows very short bounds.

I just lost a website project because some clever clot in the organisation was hell bent on using open source. I tried to explain until blue in the face that EE is based on the open source community, but they went for another designer who uses Drupal.

Maybe there’s a better way that EE can display their open sourceness. How about a microsite for the core version? or shall we say for this purpose the full open source software with upgrade options buried deeper in the microsite so not to scare off the open source evangelists.

Sorry to hear that, Sam.  This is kind of an old thread, but you might find this recent post from Rick interesting and possibly helpful.  And just to be clear, EE is not open source.  “Open code” might be a better description.