Hi all, I would like to give my 2 cents on this issue. As I have indicated in previous emails, I am building a small business that is partially dependent on ArgoUML.
As a businessman, I would be much more comfortable investing in ArgoUML development if it were under a GPL license. The reasons are fairly obvious. I don't want to see another company taking my investment and building on it without contributing anything in return. Particularly since it is very likely that such a company could be a direct competitor. With the GPL, I can compete on a level playing field. With the current license, a company that has more cash can take innovations in ArgoUML and make money without giving anything back to the ArgoUML community in return. If you are a small company and you are going to do open source, it is clear that the GPL is your best defense strategy against a competitor that has more cash. If the ArgoUML project thinks it can attract large companies to invest in their project because they want to build tools on top of ArgoUML, then there is good justification for the current license or something similar. For example, it has worked for a lot of Apache projects because they have attracted the interest and the dollars of large companies like IBM, Sun, and BEA. Those companies have made relatively large investments in many Apache projects. They do this because they see a ROI, either by lowering the cost of developing new proprietary products and/or providing services to complement those open source projects. AFAIK, I don't see any large companies offering to fork over large amounts of cash to fund ArgoUML development. I am not GPL zealot. I believe there are many cases where a BSD-like license is appropriate. However, I don't see any advantage to a BSD license for ArgoUML. Based on recent history, the companies that do take advantage of the ArgoUML BSD license simply fork the product and never look back. I think it it time to keep that from happening again. cheers, roy On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 06:18 +0200, Linus Tolke wrote: > Comments below. > > 2007/9/25, Tom Morris [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > [...] > The level of protection for developers under the current > license is exactly > ZERO. The only party with any protection is the University of > California. > I raised this last year and got no support for updating the > license to the > updated BSD license > http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php which > would provide contributors with protection. > > How is this protection expressed? I don't understand the difference in > this respect. Is this explained somewhere? > > Linus said: > > > The purpose of requiring the [original] BSD license is to > allow for > companies > > to take ArgoUML, make additions and market the resulting > product. > > All open source licenses allow this. The BSD/MIT/Apache > family of licenses > additionally allow companies to make bug fixes to our code and > then not > share those bug fixes with anyone else. Other licenses like > LGPL/Eclipse > require that bug fixes and improvements to the existing code > be shared while > allowing new code to remain closed-source. The GPL license > requires > everything to be open source including completely separate > additions. > > What we've seen in practice is that commercial companies fork > the ArgoUML > source and provide no benefit back to the community in > return. A much > better scenario would be one in which both commercial and > non-commercial > parties contribute to enhance a public commons that they can > both benefit > from rather than ending up with stale dead-end forks. A > license like the > EPL or MPL which required bug fixes to be contributed would be > one way to > achieve this. > > The question is, as I wrote before in this thread: would this work? > Will it benefit the development of ArgoUML? > > /Linus > > > I understand that forking the code base is the only way that > the license > will ever change and I don't have the energy for that right > now, so I guess > we're just stuck with what we've got for the time being. > > Tom > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > >
