Steven Noels wrote:
let me first start with thanking you for a wonderful set of tools, which we have eagerly been using over the years.
I'm glad to know it was useful.
We hope it still can be. :)
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Quite to our surprise however, we just found out that Jisp 3 now comes with the MySQL-like combo-license: GPL + commercial licensing possibility.
Of course, we cannot and will not have any say into which license you should use for your products, since it's your blood and tears that went into it. As open source developers however, we have some considerations about licenses which we'd like to confront you with.
I appreciate your talking to me about this. Please indulge me in a bit of background story, so you understand why I changed licenses.
I'm not a twenty-something college student who can afford to hack free software for free; I am an independent business man and forty-something father of three. My first "free" products appeared back in the 1980s, and I've written several programming books, so I'm a long-time believer in sharing code with the community. A society can not progress if knowledge is kept secret.
I guess quite few of us were already aware of the fact that you were not a youngster, doing Jisp just to be "kewl". People don't write stuff like Jisp to increase Slashdot karma. :-)
Many of the active project participants on the Cocoon projects fit in your profile as well: independent freelancers or tiny businesses working on Cocoon collaboratively, if not mainly for their own private business endeavours, then very often because of a need or willingness to share knowledge and learn in the process.
As such, I originally released Jisp under a libpng-style license.
In the last year or so, I've been hounded by people who "demand" support
for Jisp -- including those who use Jisp via Apache. While I politely
inform them that my time isn't free, the frequency of such requests is
increasing. When I request some form of renumeration for providing
support, they act as if I've suggested concourse with a devil.
We (the Cocoon developers) understand this - since quite often we are contacted directly - offlist - for support questions. We do have a users list to refer users to, and sometimes (not that often) business can grow out of these direct contacts. I think our situation is slightly different from yours since we serve not only a community of users, but we are also a strongly intertwingled group of developers and committers, so the "burden" of support is shared across us all. We're not perfect though, and questions (about Cocoon) remain unanswered. When that happens, we see users stepping in to help each other. But that's the big difference between the cathedral and the bazaar, I guess. We believe our open source project is composed of both community and code. The community gives longevity to our code, so that people can come and go. The ASF is always open for new open source projects, BTW, and the ASF brand does make a huge difference.
I'm intrigued though by the questions you receive about Jisp from the Apache side: do these originate from Cocoon users? While Jisp is considered a core (though switchable) part of Cocoon (it's the default of two cache implementations), its existence is shielded from the passing eye of a normal user. Also, we would expect that Jisp issues within Cocoon would be reported on the Cocoon lists, which happens, but not regularly enough to suspect people to come and nag you directly. Or is it because of other ASF projects using Jisp?
My frustration lies with people who use and praise Jisp without any
feeling of obligation to me, other than a hearty handshake (at best). My
frustration grows when I know that people are profiting from my code,
without so much as an acknowledgement.
I am not a greedy soul, and excess wealth is not one of my goals in life; however, I have three daughters, a wife, and a managerie of critters that need my financial support. These are dark economic times in our industry; survival for an independent consultant (like me) is tenuous even in the best of times.
For me, the change in license (to the GPL) is an attempt to find equity in people's use of my code. "Fairness" is, of course, a matter of perception. In my case, I have received nothing from the Apache project beyond the "hearty handshake" level. It's not that I don't want Apache to use Jisp -- it's that I know people are paid to work on Apache, and that many people make money selling Apache support and services.
I cannot speak for other projects, but very few, if any at all of the developers involved in Cocoon are getting paid full time by their employer to work on the project - all of them are here because of a passion for the project and its community of users and developers. Quite a few of us are effectively setting up a consulting shop around Cocoon-related services, but we don't consider the liberal Apache license hindering. Quite the contrary: our liberal license might attract more business since commercial ISV are clearly steering away from GPL-infected code.
<snip/>
As I've said, I'm not a greedy person; I'm willing tio resolve the issue
by giving Apache a unique license that eliminates the contention. Let me
know what your requirements are; I can allow Apache to continue using
Jisp under the libpng-style license, for example.
Nobody regards you as a greedy person, Scott. In fact, the way you enter this discussion, being honest and direct, is exactly the way we communicate, and it is very much appreciated. We understand the concerns of small businesses since we're very familiar with them.
Let me explain the main problem though:
The ASL gives users of our software the right to do with it whatever they want: use it, repackage it, sell it... as long as we are properly credited, our brand remains protected, and we are considered the only official "Apache Cocoon". We give the right of (re)distribution to our users, but that comes with a price: our libraries need to be liberally-licensed as well. Otherwise, our users (which might repackage Cocoon and sell it for money), would not be able anymore to redistribute Cocoon anymore under their own terms.
So while the idea of an exemption clause for Apache sounds nice, it wouldn't help much IMHO. But I'm willing to pass any reformulation of your license to our legal people to check that for sure.
Adding to that, what I want to point out is that even a liberal license can go together with a viable business, if there's a community around a set of code. The ASF has been created to facilitate such communies, and our license has been created with special care for business use. Instead of selling licenses, you might consider selling support to willing customers.
Perhaps Apache's developers could consider ways in which you could respond in kind? If not in money, then perhaps in other ways.
In particular, it needs to be made very clear to Apache's users that they can not expect (or demand) free support for Jisp from me. I simply can't afford it.
Duly noted: we will be happy to put this clearly in our documentation.
Adding onto that, we saw ample reference being made on http://www.coyotegulch.com/jisp/index.html to the Apache project. It's a bit awkward to see us being used as a reference "customer" case, while at the same time being made impossible to use your library.
I wouldn't say "ample reference"; a couple of links is about all. It's not like I make any claim to being part of the Apache project, nor have I received a single commercial client via my tangental association with Apache. The main reason I list Apache by name is that my commercial applications of Jisp are covered by various non-disclosure agreements; it's nice to associate with a name that people recognize. If you strenuously object, I'll be more than happy to remove the association.
If we cannot resolve the matter of the new license and would be forced to search another solution, that would be the idea, yes.
I think we can work this out to everyone's satisfaction.
I do hope so, really.
</Steven> -- Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source Java & XML An Orixo Member Read my weblog at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/ stevenn at outerthought.org stevenn at apache.org
