Hi Steve

I agree with you in many areas.

Well. well Open Source is now having lots of meanings today.Others
like octopus MFI they say Octopus Community Version is open source in
a sense that its free to use but not necessarily means that source
codes are open too, and the funny thing is that the community version
is trimmed of many important features .Very few communities today can
give full working packages without intentional bugs and sorts.But
their quite happy for your best contribution that will give edge.

-Whatever way you choose PHP will tally highest...so many evangelists
have criticized PHP with all their efforts and skills but they never
succeed.But always you will never find many Wiki, CRMs,CMSs, free
Accounting,financial ,system management apps in other language other
than in PHP....Java lovers are mostly greedy people who like to hide
codes on online.and nothing more.Java people will never give the world
of open source anything that PHP has given.


-Well back to  "...Oracle have their own twisted way of managing open
source...." this own way is what we have seen them in court with
Google for Java, java would have turned useless if the court decided
otherwise.Why do you think Java needed MySQL?Is it the same as RedHat
with Fedora?These guys are crazy and evil..I just gave ana Example of
M-Pesa with Kenya bright mind.Have propriety products with open by the
side is like taping bests things for free from Open side and use them
in propriety side.

--


Regards,
Nicholas Peter.*
Kinpro Computers.*

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Steve Obbayi <steve@sobbayi.com>
To: Skunkworks Mailing List <skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke>
Cc:
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 10:06:11 +0300 (EAT)
Subject: Re: [Skunkworks] POS solution
Hi Mark, my company is working on a POS which is a drop in of a bigger
application. You can deploy on premise or run in cloud.
You can get the source if you want, but we offer an SLA to handle
that, which is cheaper than you having a full-time dev screw
up the code. So Mark, I will send you the details probably tomorrow
and see if we can set you up with a demo. The basic
version has all that you have asked for so far.

Now Nicholas, I have to to jump in at this point and comment on some
of your points

1. When you say PHP is easier than xxxx that's very subjective, that
may be true for you and your peers. Maybe
Mark has the resources who are experts in other languages. I certainly
do have. Think about it. Besides, open source doesn't center around
PHP. There's a lot I could argue on this, but not now.

2. Just so you know MariaDB was not started because of fear of Oracle
killing MySQL it was started after Sun acquired MySQL.
I personally got involved in MariaDB right from day one back in 2008
that is 6 years ago. Another thing, the latest MySQL 5.6 has the
largest amount
of feature additions and performance improvements of any previous
MySQL version. I don't know if that constitutes killing it. The thing
with Oracle is that they have their own twisted way of managing open
source and that's what pisses off people. especially seeing the like
of Oracel, Ms and Apple have historically not been know to be too keen
on open source.

3. I agree with you on the source code. I have had a few customers ask
for source code and not make much use of it. I think
having source code just makes customers feel fuzzy and sleep better at
night but when it comes down to it they always come back for new
features from upstream. But all in all its always costly for customers
to try to maintain source code themselves because they have to
maintain full time devs, who have to be trained on the code. Then
getting patches and bug fixes may break code that was added by the dev
so they end up avoiding them. It just becomes a nightmare and this
becomes part of the reason why today many companies are stuck on
legacy systems/backward-compatibly issues.