Hi Michiel and *, On Fri, 2007-11-09 at 21:45 +0100, Michiel van der Wulp wrote:
Hi *, Hmm... I still feel misunderstood.... I know the feeling. ;-) > Michiel said: >> Was there any negative influence from the forking of Poseidon on ArgoUML? >> There was (AFAIK) never any code flowing back to ArgoUML, exactly like if >> we >> would have prevented the fork. > > Roy: > The negative influence on ArgoUML was the loss of developers to > ArgoUML and the lack of fixes and enhancements back to ArgoUML from > the organisation. I disagree that this has anything to do with our license - these guys turned their hobby into their work - so they abandoned their hobby. Even if their work would not have been based on ArgoUML, we would have lost them. > Roy: > Imagine if ArgoUML had had a stronger licence at this time of the > split how much different our progress would have been. Why do you think that? If ArgoUML would have had GPL at the time, then the Gentleware people would either 1. have written their application from scratch (i.e. NOT based on ArgoUML), or 2. they would not have started at all, or 3. they would have to run a completely different business model. Case 1 would have costed them maybe an extra year of implementation before they could have put any software on the market - that would have costed them a lot more money... Especially for case 3, it is important to realize: Currently Gentleware has a business based on selling boxes with software. If their software would have been based on GPL, then they would have to make their money e.g. from support contracts - that is a completely different business model, not good for a viable business. This makes me believe that case 3 would never have happened. Case 1 and 2 are both far more likely. BTW: Nowadays, such business is much more likely than all these years ago, as is proven by Roy. > > I have no idea what the people at Gentleware think about this issue. What > we do know is that Gentleware has no > financial or legal incentive to share their improvements to their ArgoUML > fork with the ArgoUML community. > If they would have to update ArgoUML, then that would ruin their current business. They will have to go out of business or change their business model. I can imagine a scenario where Gentleware could have shared their modifications to the core of ArgoUML and differentiated themselves with all the new features they developed. In one sense, this seems like a very reasonable scenario because they did this to a large extent. For several years they freely distriubted a "Community Edition" of their product which was very comparable to ArgoUML in its features. They only thing that was missing is that they did not release the source for the Community Edition. Their business model was and is based on selling enhanced versions of the product. The point I was trying to make before is what if Gentleware released their Community Edition as open source. I believe that it would not have harmed their business and it would have been a huge gain for ArgoUML. However, we are talking about a time when our collective understanding of how open source and commercial ventures can coexist was not as sophisticated as it is now. It is quite likely that if there were outside investors in Gentleware, they would not have looked favorably on a business plan based on them open sourcing a large percentage of their work. Someone may read what I just said and think that such a scenario would not be possible with the GPL. Actually it would be possible if the ArgoUML community were organized in such a way that it could grant a "different license" to a commercial venture like Gentleware. It may not have been possible back then, but perhaps it could be now with help from the Software Conservancy. Look at MySQL. A very successful open source project that has benefited many people and has been able to attract commercial investment that has directly benefited the MySQL open source project as well as the global software community. They have been able to do this with the combination of the GPL along with "alternate" licenses that generate revenue. Some may point out that MySQL is a commercial entity and ArgoUML is not. True. But I believe it is possible to for a non-profit organization to negotiate software licenses with outside commercial entities. However, this is not a professional opinion because I am not a lawyer. ;-) > > We can't fix that in hindsight but we can prevent it from happening again. Agreed. > > But it seems sticking to BSD will stop at least one commercial > developer from commiting code back to us so I think we do need to > tackle that by a licence change. > Yes, Poseidon is a tool to draw UML diagrams, just as ArgoUML - in fact we are direct competitors. And thanks to the case of Roy, the situation for AgoUML is changed: Roy's application is different: he wants ArgoUML to become part of a toolchain. So, if used in toolchains, ArgoUML would most probably benefit from a GPL type of license. I agree to go over to something like GPL. (or EPL, LGPL - do not know which yet) I also lean towards the GPL, but I will say again that we need legal advice on this issue of modifying the current license. Some people believe that it is not feasible for ArgoUML to switch to GPL now. They may be right, but we need professional advice on what options are available to us and their respective advantages and disadvantages. Doing this, we will stop the Poseidon scenario from happening, which I do not require (my humble opinion), but I see such scenario as less likely for the future anyhow, so I do not mind. BTW: AndroMDA uses BSD license (took me quite some time to find this out). How do they cope? Their situation is substantially different with AndroMDA than it is with ArgoUML. At least one of the lead developers makes a living from AndroMDA, by doing training and consulting. I suspected that this was their intention from the beginning. This is made possible because AndroMDA tool is much less accessible then ArgoUML. From a user perspective, AndroMDA has a vastly steeper learning curve then ArgoUML. Why they chose BSD, we can either speculate or we can ask them. If there was a commercial fork of AndromMDA which took some of the key developers, I believe it would likely be a loss for the AndroMDA community. However, it would be a potentially significant gain for any developers or power users who did not participate in the commercial fork. That is because the market value of their AndroMDA expertise would significantly increase if the commercial venture were successful. A successful commercial fork would create a larger market for their services. Of course, a commercial venture would be possible with the GPL, but it would obviously constrain the types of possible business models. cheers, roy �
