Submission + - GPL Integration forcing Product Switch
g8orade writes: "The company where I work has in the past couple of years started using BestPractical's Request Tracker (RT) to manage all kinds of internal work processes, and a few that involve clients, that we used to handle with email, and we have adopted Twiki as our internal online documentation platform.
We are a shipping services outsourcing company running a custom program built on/with Oracle internally, with some screens available to our clients and suppliers that allow them to track and perform error resolution.
Because we would like to integrate RT and Twiki's features with our internal ERP system, we are considering dropping both in favor of Atlassian's offerings, Confluence and Jira. Atlassian would sell us perpetual / development rights and we would not incur any GPL liability to our internal code. (Offering some of our ERP functions to our clients through the web is where we run into the "distribution" problem of having to make our code GPL).
I recognize this is just the GPL in action, if my company doesn't share its proprietary ERP oriented code with the world why should we have the benefits of value from Twiki and RT being delivered to our clients as part our offering?
My question to Slashdot readers is, has your company run into this issue, using a GPL product for a while, but then when you want to integrate with proprietary code that you "distribute" electing to buy a similar closed source product to avoid losing ownership of your own? What did you do?
What would happen if someone wanted to integrate Great Plains Accounting into Compiere, or SugarCRM into SAP / JD Edwards ERP?"
We are a shipping services outsourcing company running a custom program built on/with Oracle internally, with some screens available to our clients and suppliers that allow them to track and perform error resolution.
Because we would like to integrate RT and Twiki's features with our internal ERP system, we are considering dropping both in favor of Atlassian's offerings, Confluence and Jira. Atlassian would sell us perpetual / development rights and we would not incur any GPL liability to our internal code. (Offering some of our ERP functions to our clients through the web is where we run into the "distribution" problem of having to make our code GPL).
I recognize this is just the GPL in action, if my company doesn't share its proprietary ERP oriented code with the world why should we have the benefits of value from Twiki and RT being delivered to our clients as part our offering?
My question to Slashdot readers is, has your company run into this issue, using a GPL product for a while, but then when you want to integrate with proprietary code that you "distribute" electing to buy a similar closed source product to avoid losing ownership of your own? What did you do?
What would happen if someone wanted to integrate Great Plains Accounting into Compiere, or SugarCRM into SAP / JD Edwards ERP?"
