No, your assumptions are pretty wrong and I will try to explain why below (and most of them are already explained on the www.collaborativesource.org site).
At 12:12 15/06/2004, you wrote:
1. Jahia Ltd. owns the code for now and for ever.
Wrong. Jahia Ltd "owns" the part it developed. For the rest, Jahia Ltd only has an exploitation right to reuse some code. The original contributors still own the portion of code they created. As stated in the contribution document:
2. You grant to Jahia Ltd a non-exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, no-charge, transferable copyright license to use, execute,
prepare derivative works of, and distribute (internally and externally, in object code and source code form) your Contributions.
Except for the rights granted to Jahia Ltd in this paragraph, You reserve all right, title and interest in and to your Contributions.
This is 100% similar to any open source license (e.g. the Apache contribution document).
So for example if you develop an extension which you plan to contribute to Jahia in exchange of a license, nothing prevents you to dual-license it and to fully "open source" it under a GPL, an Apache or even to resell it under a proprietary license. Jahia Ltd does not care as Jahia Ltd only wants to be able to repackage the whole program as a single work.
2. Only Jahia Ltd can sell the code (Jahia portal).
Wrong. As stated above, each IP right owner can dual license and make everything he wants with the code he created. Moreover Jahia Ltd does not make any direct sales. Then Jahia Ltd delegates the license sales to partners. You may also OEM Jahia (= use Jahia under your own terms, conditions, license and brand) into your own software offering. Of course, in such a case, you will have to accept the Jahia conditions, that's to say to pay in cash or in kind a value that is at least equal to the benefits you will gain by reusing the Jahia code for your own benefits. Please refer to the Jahia partnership programs (www.jahia.org/partners).
3. Nobody else can sell the code -- no matter how much they 'collaborate'.
Wrong. Jahia Ltd is just an "empty shell" that collects and redistributes money to the community. So this assumption is totally wrong as Jahia Ltd directly financed several key contributors on the project on a daily basis, moreover, thanks to the license revenues collected in cash, Jahia Ltd can also indirectly sponsorized other fully free and open source projects (for example Jahia Ltd is now sponsorizing some committers of the Apache Jetspeed 2 project which we are integrating into Jahia - this is a way to finance free open source framworks and librarires while reselling the easy to install and ready to use package.).
Moreover Jahia has no viral effect. You are not forced to provide your extensions to the Jahia community if you do not want to share them. You may even resell them under a proprietary license if you want.
4. Anybody can use the code (internal or commercially) ONLY if:
4.a They pay Euro 30,000 to Jahia Ltd.
The Jahia pricing starts at 4'990 Euro (and further planned editions will still lower this entry price). You refer here to the most expensive Jahia edition. Jahia is even free for charitable organizations, for your personal home page or for any other open source projects. Moreover the price is only for the production servers (not for dev, test, demo,...) and per server (not per CPU).
The Jahia pricing is set according to its current market value in our market niche (and it seems to me that Jahia is rather quite affordable vs our main competitors). The pricing of Jahia has NOTHING to do with the fact that the source code of Jahia is open or not. IMHO the biggest error of the open source world was to mix free (like in a free speech) and free (like in a free beer) terms. You may have free proprietary software (= freeware) and commercial open source software.
or
4.b Jahia Ltd decide that their contribution is 'significant'.
Of course. This is the only manner to enforce a real quid pro quo paradigm. The collaborative source license was created to enforce such a philosophy. This is the only difference with an open source license and we think that it is pretty fair. Technology free-riders are taxed while active contributors do not pay their license fee. Finally the "value" of the contribution is decided by the Technical Committee which regroup all the current committers. The system is then open to anyone and based on a meritocracy similar to the Apache Fondation excepted that committers need to "value" the work other developers did (... and believe me we are not too difficult to convince...).
5. Anybody can, however, work for free to make the code better so that Jahia Ltd can turn around and sell it to people for Euro 30,000.
Nobody is working for free as the contributors will exchange their work against some free licenses they would else need to pay cash. If you really become a long term committer and that you are no more counting the numbers of days you are spending on the Jahia project, then you may even grade in the "hierarchy" and become a shareholder of the company in order to receive some benefits in the future, if any.
6. Even if Jahia Ltd decides that someone's contribution is significant, they only get the portal for at most one year. After that they still have to pay 6,000/yr to Jahia Ltd no matter how much they 'collaborated' initially.
Wrong. In opposite to other leasing types of license (e.g. Microsoft), in the jahia case you buy a perpetual license. You do not have to pay anything in the future in order to continue tho use the version of the program you baught. The budget you mentionned is a "maintenance and upgrade budget". It can be compared as a yearly subscription fee similar to what RedHat or other professional open source companies are doing. This budget allows Jahia Ltd to finance year after year the administrative costs (lawyer, notary, taxes, equipments, servers, web site, licenses,...) + the min. evolutive and corrective maintenance tasks on the program in order to ensure that a dedicated, long term and qualified team can be assigned on them. This is in the interest of all the users of the technology and will insure that the program is not suddently let in the blue because of the retirement of one or two of the main committers like it is often the case for other open source projects. Please remember that having access to 1 million lines of code without the adequate ressources to maintain, enhance, debug,... it, is just worth nothing for most of the Jahia users...
Sounds like a sweet deal ... for Jahia Ltd.
Not so good for anyone else who works for free to make you guys money.
If we wanted to make money, we would have released Jahia under a traditional proprietary license. We do not beleive that selling services the day and coding software the night is not a competitive and sustainable business model. We can not leverage any cross-selling opportunities (e.g. selling expensive hardware to sponsorize free software) like major IT players can do.
Finally I do not see any difference between our license and for example the so-called free and open GPL used by MySQL AB (please read carefully this page: http://www.mysql.com/products/licensing/commercial-license.html). Our licensing schema is even more fair as, in the latter case, even if you contribute something to MySQL, you will still need to buy the commercial license without getting any way to exchange your work against some free licenses.
We believe to a common ground between free software and commercial software in the principle of giving value in return for value. Trade is the basis of capitalism, and in fact it is already the basis for open software as well, in the form of respect. By arranging for both money and respect to flow in the merit stages we can combine the advantages of open-source software with capitalist economics and motivation.
So, in summary our licensing policy is taxing only to the one who attempts to get an unfair benefit of other peoples' work. The choice of payment type is completely up to the user. The quid pro quo principle is the best way to ensure the availability of high-quality, rapidly evolving software while keeping full and free access to the whole source code. Thanks to the community of contributors, users have battle-tested and well-integrated software. Thanks to the paying customers, the editor can afford to hire great developers and have them work full-time on developing and maintaining the product. Seems reasonnable to me.
Best Regards
St�phane Croisier
CEO Jahia Ltd
