The fact that you can get source somewhere else is irrelevant, and I think you know it. It’s not so much the availability of source that we take issue with, it’s the head-fake you are giving potential customers about being "open source" for your core product, which you clearly are not.

At a strategic marketing level, you have apparently decided that being associated with open source is desirable. So, you’ve inappropriately co-opted open source branding for your product based on your own, unique, non-standard definition. It’s a lot like wearing leather to an environmental rally you drove to in a Hummer. Apparently, you hope that once you mix in with the crowd, they might not notice what you arrived in and they’ll accept your bona fides.

After I wrote this post, I was flooded with input from others who have also taken issue with the fact that you label your proprietary system as "open source." Your company has used essentially the same defense to my post here and has been dinged as far back as 2006 for what that blogger describes as "cheap insinuations" of being open source.

I can only surmise this 1984-like doublespeak is, and has been, deliberate. Your web site continues to misquote Gartner, claiming you are the only "first and only credible Open Source BPMS" when in fact, the very link you quote as a source labels you, at best, "open-source-like." It’s amazing to me that the authors of this report haven’t called you out for misusing it for so long.

I do admire the chutzpah it takes to call black white.

100% of the code that goes into the runtime components of Intalio|BPMS Community Edition is licensed under the Apache Public License. These are essentially the Apache ODE BPEL engine and the Tempo Workflow framework, plus a lot of existing open source components, such as Apache Tomcat and the Orbeon XForms engine. I doubt that anyone interested in modifying the code of Intalio|BPMS Community Edition would have any difficulty putting these pieces together. Nevertheless, we’d be happy to create a build for you if you want.

Best regards
Ismael Ghalimi, CEO
Intalio, Inc.