I'm not sure I buy the premise that there are lots of small companies willing to bet their existence on breaking the law and not getting caught AND that those same companies would be deterred by the difference, if any, in enforcement between GPL and EPL.
> The EPL was created by IBM to allow it to make proprietary extensions while > keeping > the growing Eclipse open source community content. It appears to have been > very successful for the Eclipse project. I'm not a huge fan of the undue influence that IBM exerts, but this doesn't match my understanding of the history. IBM created the Common Public License and the Eclipse Foundation created the Eclipse Public License. The initial Eclipse source came entirely from IBM, so they didn't need a license to do *anything* with it. More recently there have been significant contributions of source code and cash from a number of other significant players and the Eclipse Foundation lawyers are charged with protecting all the intellectual property that it owns. > ArgoUML could switch to the GPL v2 now, and announce that it will consider > requests for a different license. This would allow any serious large > companies to approach ArgoUML to do extensions. That doesn't work. The only way have clear provenance for the source code is to get *all* contributors to contractually agree to the new license if its terms conflict with the old license. From a practical point of view that means that you need to a) draft contributor's agreement that names the multiple license and b) get each contributor to sign it before adding their contributions to the source pool. Going back and doing this after the fact is a nightmare. Going from BSD to anything else is a special case because the starting license is so permissive. The fact that you have to say "GPL v2" highlights another issue with the GPL in addition to the fact that it prohibits commercial extensions. It's a moving target. This year Stallman was fixated on changing it to punish Novell/Microsoft. Who knows what next year will bring? > Frankly, my concern is that there are unscrupulous small-to-medium size > companies that have and will copy and modify open source code without any > attribution and/or any investment back to the projects they took the code.. > Without mentioning names, I have heard specific allegations from informed > sources about a "medium" sized company in the UML tools market has done that > on a consistent basis. This is the type of company that concerns me. If you're confident of your (anonymous) sources and are that concerned, I'd suggest taking the issue to a court of your choosing. It clearly doesn't involve ArgoUML since what you describe would be legal for ArgoUML code. > If ArgoUML should attract serious interest from a large software company, > they will just offer fat salaries to some or all of the key developers of > ArgoUML. And this would be who? IBM/Rational? Already have one or two UML tools. Microsoft? Don't do UML. I'd love to hear who the candidates are. > I should also note there have been several GPL software projects > that have been effectively "acquired", so the GPL wouldn't be barrier that > kind of acquisition.. This goes back to what I mentioned before about clear provenance. It works if you've got a sole author or a set of contributors who are willing to sign a contract assigning their copyright, but it doesn't work for a code base with dozens of contributors, some of whom can no long be found, if the existing license doesn't already allow for it. > If it is a large company, you can negotiate for something in return. ;-) As soon as we start operating as a commercial entity, we'd likely no longer qualify for the Software Conservancy. > IMHO, any alternative to the GPL will not give ArgoUML any practical > protection for the reasons I stated above. I don't know Mr. Moglen myself, so I'm not really in a position to refute your claims that he selectively defends his clients' intellectual property rights to suit his personal preferences. It's a pretty serious charge though, so I'd hope to see some substantiation before we made a decision based on it. Is LGPL close enough that he'd enforce it or is it "GPL or nothing"? LGPL has about the same balance between commerical and open source interests as EPL. Can we get some facts and figures -- or at least pointers to non-anonymous sources -- to support the argument that nothing except the GPL will be enforced? Tom --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
