Hello Roy!
Seeing this I am very glad that I have been dragging my feet with this
issue. Tom has been advocating an Eclipse- or LGPL-like license if I
understand it correctly.
Perhaps the suggestion to stick to BSD is not good.
I am currently at work just browsing the headlines but I will read your
entire mail detail tonight and see if I get a better understanding of what
you want to do.
/Linus
2007/11/1, Roy Feldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
> 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
> >
> >
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>
>
