Arvind Mahendra wrote:What I am referring to however are actual software solutions and the question of whether it is fair for a company to download a CRM solution, from the many thousands of free open one's out there, have it tweaked by a team of developer's and sell it in the open market as their own without any revenue sharing with the original contributors?
Is it fair to use software in accordance with the terms it is licensed by the creators? Certainly. If someone thought they would be exploited, they should not have released their software/code with such liberal licensing terms.
What has happened in practice is companies that use open source (IBM, Novel, Linksys and Sun to name a few larger ones) end up contributing back code because they encounter bugs or make additions and extensions in order to get their own work done. Either by the terms of the license (i.e. GPL requires if you change the code, you make the source available), to be good "citizens" of the community, or to stick a thumb in Microsoft's eye (like Sun did with OpenOffice).
Without people
testing and using software, we can't tell if it works. By using open source software, these "exploiters" are actually helping a developer by testing, giving feedback and suggesting changes. Some companies pay big money for QA, these freeloading open source developers get it for nothing!