Am Wed, 18 Sep 2013 09:50:48 +0100 schrieb David Chisnall <[email protected]> :
> Hi, > > On 17 Sep 2013, at 22:45, Pirmin Braun <[email protected]> wrote: > > > we plan to license the upcoming IntarS 7 under this license. > > What do you think about it? > > What is your goal with this license? I don't think that it will work to > encourage contributors, because I certainly wouldn't send patches to a > project where I might suddenly find that I'd have to pay if I started using > it a lot. I'd also have the same reaction to using it: if I build a program > using it and deploy it, I don't want to suddenly find that I'd have to pay > extra if it became popular. The goal is to earn additional money from those power users that make themselves lots of money from using the software and on the other hand preserve the LGPL conditions for all others. There have been no contributors so far except professional programmers working for money. You only have to pay extra when it turns out that you've become a company using the product permanently with more than 5 concurrent named users. Normally you grow into this situation. You won't "suddenly" find out since you'll be informed about this very clearly on every login. When you're a company and planning to hire another employee who will - use the software - under an own login name - concurrently with at least 5 others - permanently then you will need this 900,-- EUR additional investment. Which is peanuts compared to the other costs associated with creating a new work place. > > Is the goal simply to allow people to port it to other systems? Again, I'm > not sure why I'd put the effort into putting this in the FreeBSD ports tree > and ensuring that it worked (nor why Sebastian would do the same for OpenBSD) > if we'd end up having to pay if we used it in anything other than a very > small scale. The point is commercial usage. Edu, privat, non profit usage is free in any scale. Additionally you are free to license your port under your own license and also earn license fees (with different conditions) as you like - as long as we get our share from our defined power users. It's the end user's responsibility to pay all affected licensors in the license chain their share. For such a value added derived work that wants extra license fees from the end user we reduce our claim to 30% (or whatever) to give partners more room for their own business model. So a partner might sell his derived work well below our price of the original work. But in no case a contributor has to pay us. We don't sell OEM licenses. > > As others have pointed out, it is not OSI or FSF compliant. This may also > mean that it would be hard to distribute in binary form. As it's currently > written, it's an end-user license agreement, and so we'd have difficulty > distributing it, because we'd need to have a framework in place that would > require the user to accept the license before installing it. We do this with > the Oracle / Sun JDK and a few other packages already, and it requires manual > intervention and prevents us from distributing binary builds. with the proposed draft of the IntarS license this is not the case. You can install the binary and use it. No need to accept anything. Even when you're a commercial company you can work with up to 5 concurrent named users for years. You even can do load tests or evaluation with more users. Only when you permanently (longer than 1 month) have more than 5 concurrent commercial named users there is a decision to be made: either pay license fees or use IntarS with less users or at least make users login with the same name or at different times. > > David > Besides all that, the FSF has created the LGPL to address certain cases. Since then the world has changed a lot. Open Source has beome ubiquitous. The war is won. Just have a look in your Android device Settings/About .../Legal Notices/Open Source Licenses. There are now more "certain cases" that should be honored. One of these is that there are Billion-Dollar-Companies taking advantage of Open Source software while the programmers have nothing more than a mention in the "About" section. Attending Open Source meetings is always a special low budget experience. Source Forge is crowded with abandoned projects and there are so few that can earn their living from doing Open Source. Does it have to be that way? I think it's time to discuss a CLGPL (C like "Commercial"). -- Pirmin Braun - IntarS Unternehmenssoftware GmbH - Am Hofbräuhaus 1 - 96450 Coburg +49 2642 40526292 +49 174 9747584 - skype:pirminb www.intars.de [email protected] Geschäftsführer: Pirmin Braun, Ralf Engelhardt Registergericht: Amtsgericht Coburg HRB3136 _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnustep mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
