Please see below: On Jul 15, 7:05 pm, "Michael Hartl" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Any reason? .. I thought it would be commercial friendly? after all > > you guys are backed by Y combinator. > > There's nothing intrinsically commercial-unfriendly about the GNU > AGPL; it just requires that modified code also be released under the > AGPL. For some commercial enterprises this is fine, since the value > of a website is often the brand and community, rather than the source > code. (Large chunks of many successful websites are already open > source, including the entire reddit codebase.)
Yes absolutely correct. But the problem is not there i.e. to contribute code back to the community the problem I see is often time you need integrate with other source which are under MIT or other license to make the site to go around. And it doesn't work well. If I am not mistaken as an example often time Apache project doesn't want to combine code from license that are not compatible. The only reason insoshi exist is because of MIT lic, Ruby on Rails and Ruby under Ruby license. It is of course your choice to choose the license you prefer. > Of course, some > businesses may want to keep their source code private (to protect > proprietary information, for example). We are preparing to offer > Insoshi under a commercial license for those cases. > > This business model may sound familiar: it's essentially the > dual-license model pioneered by MySQL (which offers its software under > both the GNU GPL and under a commercial license). By adopting this > model, we hope to be able to support more developers to work on > Insoshi than would be possible using a more permissive license (such > as the MIT license). Adopting the MIT license would in one sense be > friendlier for commercial enterprises, who could then use our code > without restriction (or payment), but under those circumstances we > would cease to be a startup and would be at most a consulting firm. I beg to differ. Ruby on Rails is under MIT and its very popular as far as I can tell there are dozens of other flagship products like Apache HTTP server under similar license. Also to add in terms of MySQL .. Number of usages for MySQL server dropped after MySQL decided to adopt the above policy i.e. from version 4 to 5 .. to the best of my knowledge. I hope and wish your model will succeed and I agree with you in terms of restriction and payment issue that you describe. So don't get me wrong at the end of the day -- its a decision you made. > (There's nothing wrong with consulting firms, but startups must be > product businesses, since consulting doesn't scale well as you add > users.) Moreover, in that case we would be less able to afford > continued development of Insoshi, which would ultimately be quite > unfriendly to our users. Again agree and I see clearly why the decision was made to make an application rather then a plugin. > > Also as I understand some of the code are from "Lovd by Less". > > We do have a small amount of Lovd code, which is licensed under the > MIT license. Actually, we only use one method, the 'to_safe_uri' > method from less_monkey_patching. We expected to use more, but the > conventions used in the Lovd code are not quite compatible with > Insoshi. (The one feature they have that we lack, a photo album, has > already been added in a branch from a contributor; starting tomorrow > I'll begin work on integrating that branch, which also contains > numerous user experience improvements.) So you are willing to leverage of other open source project but not willing others to do so from your project? Maybe I am wrong but I find it unfair. Furthermore I understand the reason behind Y Combinators funding .. not sure "wikinomics" theory applies here. A simple request it would be a good idea to mention about your licensing policy on the front page .. just like wordpress or ruby on rails.. Open source is wide open-ended term up until you read the fine print. Cheers Rob --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Insoshi developer site: http://dogfood.insoshi.com/ Insoshi documentation: http://docs.insoshi.com/ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Insoshi" 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/insoshi?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
