Right. Forking is a good thing usually (for Open Source projects at least) — its part of what being Open is actually supposed to foster. illumos itself exists because forking the Sun source code was legally possible.
It’s always a good idea to think through why you want to be “Open Source”. If your goal is to foster interest and cooperation — including getting other people to contribute to the system, then you really need to be prepared to treat them fairly by giving something to them as well — namely the ability to use, modify, and redistribute your project freely. There are legitimate business reasons to give people access to the source code without giving them rights to redistribute — for example letting users modify the system or self support, for their own uses. If that’s the case, give away a source license; and don’t worry about being “Open” or “Libre”. This is just as valid a business strategy as going proprietary completely. Just be clear as to what you’re trying to achieve, and *then* pick a licensing strategy. - Garrett On Tue, Nov 8, 2016 at 12:32 PM, Jim Klimov <[email protected]> wrote: > 8 ноября 2016 г. 18:29:33 CET, Alan Coopersmith < > [email protected]> пишет: > >On 11/ 8/16 08:48 AM, Gabriele Bulfon wrote: > >> My question is: beside opening the source to non-profit people, how > >much are we > >> protected against > >> people forking and maybe redistributing and packaging it as their own > >product? > >> Do we have any chance to protect us from this, but still be > > considered open source? > > > > No - a key qualifier of open source is granting others the rights to > > fork, > > redistribute, and package their own versions. If you don't allow that, > > then > > you're "shared source" or something else, not Open Source. > > > > See points #1 & #3 in https://opensource.org/osd > > > > -alan- > > > > Your best protection against forking is to make your community comfortable > so people stick with the experts - you - rather than fork. They contribute > and if younaccept that back - help make the product more comfortable and > useful for themselves, and maybe others. Cooperation via github starts by > pushing the Fork button BTW ;) > > But even if someone does fork away into a new project, they might do so to > explore areas and opportunities you won't - and with license staying the > same (they still don't have rights to your and generally contributors' > original IP sufficient to relicense differently) - you can pick back what > you like into your parent project. > > Jim > -- > Typos courtesy of K-9 Mail on my Samsung Android > ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
