On 23/09/2010 19:37, Ricardo Andre Redder Junior wrote: > I believe most of my questions are answered now... as I can see, whether > creating a fork is legal or not, it's very clear that if one decides to > create a fork, and keep working on the MPL version, will face an endless > legal battle, for IPs, for licenses, for package names, etc. and at the > end... probably the result would not be satisfactory. Thus... I'm sure > this kind of environment would be incompatible with an open source > project under MPL or LGPL... > > The biggest problem that I see is that open source projects, which have > LGPL (or something like that) as a strong requirement, i.e. changing to > AGPL is not even considered (I imagine Eclipse, Jasper, etc... are > examples of that) now... are without good options.
First of all: if you're talking about Eclipse, that's a project heavily sponsored by companies such as IBM (and the other members of the Eclipse Foundation). They could afford a license. Moreover, Eclipse doesn't accept LGPL: it demands EPL (with some exceptions). A second thing I want to point out: JasperReports can continue to use iText 5.+ and remain LGPL because they are good F/OSS citizens. We've made an agreement with JasperSoft. They understand reason (and so do we). The people yelling "Fork! Fork! Fork!" don't. As mentioned by Mark in reply to another mail: of biggest concern for the people who fork would be exactly how they obtain their fixes. If a problem is reported and we fix this code in version 5x, it would certainly be completely illegal and a complete violation of our IP if someone takes this fix and adapts it back to an older version. Unless, of course they adopt the AGPL for the fix and thus you have accomplished nothing. Perhaps people yelling "Fork!" are all unaware of what it takes to manage such a project, not only from the personal side in which multiple man years of effort are expended (Ohloh estimates that it would take 40 man years to build iText from scratch). On top of that, one also has to ensure that the IP is clean. Without this, corporate customers who wish to use the product run a very high risk of being sued for violation. If they decided to use an open source product, they would have no one to turn to because of a license like the LGPL which indemnifies the contributors. Tobias twisted my words making fun of "taking responsibility for iText 2.x". Of course NOBODY takes responsibility for the old version, but I've worked a full year in close cooperation with a battery of lawyers to clean up iText and to make an overview of the Intellectual Property, removing every single line of rogue code. That was not the most exciting year of my life, but the result is iText 5.+. That's F/OSS today. F/OSS used to be something run by hackers, nowadays every F/OSS company needs to have lawyers on its payroll. These types of things do not and will transfer with any fork. You merely have the LGPL license but that in itself provides no protection to corporate entities whatsoever. In my opinion, adopting iText would likely be diminished not increased. The actions of a few could likely cause the demise of all they think they are trying to benefit. And for what... the price for a license of iText? What corporation would balance the potential for multi-hundreds of thousands of dollar lawsuit against $2000 or whatever it might be. It will cost the company more than $2000 in legal fees to review the LGPL and its use in iText. It will cost the company more than that in time and effort to try to adopt, adapt, fix and maintain the fork. If people yelling "Fork" started to think with a corporate hat and not a developer's hat, they'd think differently. And now, on with the book: 15 chapters (good for 525 pages) have been typeset for the first time. While waiting for the final chapter (I've written 16 chapters), I've been reading and correcting 8 chapters. I almost fell from my chair when I read Tobias' remark saying documentation wasn't necessary... best regards, Bruno ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Nokia and AT&T present the 2010 Calling All Innovators-North America contest Create new apps & games for the Nokia N8 for consumers in U.S. and Canada $10 million total in prizes - $4M cash, 500 devices, nearly $6M in marketing Develop with Nokia Qt SDK, Web Runtime, or Java and Publish to Ovi Store http://p.sf.net/sfu/nokia-dev2dev _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list iText-questions@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions Buy the iText book: http://www.itextpdf.com/book/ Check the site with examples before you ask questions: http://www.1t3xt.info/examples/ You can also search the keywords list: http://1t3xt.info/tutorials/keywords/
