Thanks for your quick response Geoff, > You do realise that Joomla, Mambo and Drupal are *all* released under > GPL? I do realise they are released under GPL and if FarCry was developed in PHP and had the pool of developers that those projects can draw on I'd be all for the change to GPL. This is because those communities by their origin and nature open source minded. Those communities are also "democratic" and allow the community to drive the direction of the project whereas FarCry on the other hand has its benevolent (and generous) dictator ;). Those CMS frameworks also are geared towards the needs community sites and portals. My point with all this that it is dangerous to directly equate the environment FC has to live in with those of these other big CMS's licensed under GPL.
> Can you point to plugins in the Mambo, Joomla or Drupal community that > are closed source? Or even released under a different license to GPL? Nope and that fact would be a large problem for Drupal if it was written in ColdFusion as there would be so few modules released as you can't release anything for Drupal (themes included) that isn't compatible with GPL. For example a theme that was released under GPL could not be modified and have those modifications distributed under anything but GPL. Many theme and module developers has expressed that they would like to release their contributions under a less restrictive license but can't. > I'd dispute this would be any different under GPL. I'm not sure why > there is this belief that people after a free CMS would not consider > FarCry because its GPL vs CPL. It doesn't appear to be an issue in > any other programming community. Selfish or selfless -- there is > nothing stopping CF developers using FarCry under GPL to deploy sites > in a shared hosting environment. I agree that to someone deploying FarCry it might not matter but to anyone who wants to customise their install, share snippets between projects or develop plugins they are now bound to distribute their code under GPL. So what I'm saying is -> its harder to release plugins -> less pluins mean less functionality -> FarCry and its potential is reduced -> less users -> less contributions. > > > If you change to GPLv3 and the majority of FarCry installs are under > > this license, plugin developers can't sell their plugins to be > > installed into GPL FarCry, they would be forced to distribute under > > GPL. You then get less plugins developed and the result being that > > FarcCry will always be behind the other major CMS's in terms of > > features. > > If FarCry is plain GPL, without a modification to the license, *all* > plugins would be GPL, because they extend the underlying framework > directly. Thats great for plugin developers that happy with releasing their code under GPL but makes it harder for those who aren't as they would then need to ensure that anyone that licenses their plugin must also have a commercial or non GPL license of FarCry > > If we provide an exception to the GPL we could allow plugins to be > licensed differently. Perhaps as LGPL or even Commercial. However, > its true that users are always going to have negotiate potential > complications trying to distribute their GPL based FarCry application > with a Commercial plugin. Of course a commercial license for the > FarCry core would remove any complication. We are drafting an > exception for templates and considering another for plugins. Okay if this is the case then you should really post this information on your blog post/paper regarding this change because to me and I'm guessing many others there will be a huge difference in opinion once we can see the license exceptions you would include if you went down the GPL route. Otherwise its like agreeing to get on a bus not knowing if its going to Darling Harbour or Kings Cross :). I would recommend exceptions for webtops, plugins and skeletons allowing all these components customised by others to be released under any license they choose. > > Would an exception allowing plugin developers to release under > different licenses allay your concerns? Yes this would as it should allow plugin developers freedom but you should inlcude themes or webtops in the exceptions if possible. > > Again I would remind you that the "other CMSs" you refer to as being > ahead are in fact GPL today, and have been since inception. And do > *not* have commercial licensing options available. This touches on another point I haven't brought up yet, you are right that those other CMS's are GPL and don't have commercial licenses whereas under the proposed changes FarCry will. This fact doesn't sit too well with me because unless there is some change to the way the FarCry project will be run you would have this(please correct if this isn't true): * all modifications made must be published and distributed under GPL unless they accompany a commercial license of FarCry * all releases of FarCry copyrighted to Daemon (including submissions made by others) * Daemon being able to change the licensing in the future at their discretion? I guess it really comes down to whether Daemon are happy to continue to be the major contributor of code for FarCry, if you are then a new dual licence won't affect much I'd imagine. If however it is a goal of Daemon to encourage more contributions of code then you must have more users and developers of FarCry to do this. The best way I see to acheive that is to have the most flexible, un-restrictive and simple licensing which IMHO would be the current CPL. The current CPL gives people no reason or excuses to not use FarCry for their projects. I suspect that you might be blaming the current licensing for receiving little contributions when it may simply be that you didn't have critical mass when it comes to users/developers. Why not release version 5 under the current license and see what happens in this regard and let everyone know that towards the next major release you will considering FC's future in regards to licensing rather than drop this change now which seems kind of last minute and rushed. Cheers, Steve. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "farcry-dev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/farcry-dev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
