After all, the toy edition is good enough. It works. It just will come with no guarantees that it won't eat your data, and it will probably be quite slow.
I can understand if you want to keep certain features in the closed-source version to return the costs and make profit. But that shouldn't impede the Boost version from evolving. If that feature has high demand, I would expect it to eventually appear in the open-source version. If soneone offers a patch implementing that feature, I would expect you to give a fair consideration of it, even if it makes things differently to your closed-source code. What I wouldn't expect or want to see is the author referring the community to the commercial version instead.
I'd hope to allow competition. But if you think developing high quality C++ code is expensive, then developing high quality storage code is considerably more so. I think recouping the cost of development is very reasonable, after which it can be open sourced.
I'd like to make myself clear. I'm absolutely not against people making money on the software they write. But at the same time, if those people come to Boost I think they should be aware and committed to Boost and open-source community. If there is a chance of a conflict between making profit and commitment to opensource, I'd rather them avoid that conflict by not coming to Boost in the first place.
Profit and open source are not in conflict. If anything, especially in recent years, there is plenty of profit in open source. I, and many others even on here, make a living from it. I'm also mindful of Anthony Williams' Just Threads! which is effectively a v4 complete rewrite of Boost.Thread. That's a commercial product held totally separate to Boost, and it has been woefully underused because people didn't know it existed. Some would argue - and I'm not sure I include myself here - that if Just Threads! were the all new singing and dancing Boost.Thread rewrite, and if people running into problems with Boost.Thread could pay the fee for the new rewrite until its development costs were paid off, that could bring new very high quality developed for profit libraries to Boost. As I said, I'm not sure I agree with that myself, lots of slippery slopes in there. But equally I've seen old versions of big games engines released to open source after they no longer make money, and that's been a *huge* benefit to open source. So the model can work, and work very well. Niall -- ned Productions Limited Consulting http://www.nedproductions.biz/ http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/