I am
a large user of open source projects from places like SourceForge and Apache. I
am in a position of influence at my current company and I am able to promote
their use within my team and also assign resources to figure out issues that are
discovered and at least report them to the appropriate bug lists if not submit a
patch. We almost always choose open-source over other products and are proud of
the low licensing burden that the engineering team puts on the funds of the
company.
But
on more than one occasion now we have been "burnt" by projects where their
owners see the possibility of making some bucks because their project has become
popular and try to change from an LGPL style license to a for-fee license. My
first question about this is - is this actually allowed under these licenses? I
am pretty sure it must be at least frowned upon by the open source purists out
there. In my opinion it is certainly against the spirit of open-source
anyway.
Clearly these projects contribute to the profit-making
ability of my company, but we at least do what we can to support these projects
in these belt-tightening times. Could we argue that since we logged bugs and
patches that we are entitled a portion of any profits derived in the
future? And what of open source projects that make use of other open source
projects - where do they turn in this situation?
Of
course, since the code is out there in the public domain, there appears no
reason to not re-post it to SourceForge even if the owners shut the original
project down. As long as the required open source license is there, I see no
real problem in launching a new project based entirely on the original one.
Perhaps this will discourage others from attempting to gouge profits, because
they will be undermined anyway by free versions.
Anyway, perhaps this is just an outlet for me to vent
my frustration at this practice. It just grinds me that the argument used by
many of these project "owners" is that it is taking up too much of their time,
and yet they are willing to accept the input (and hence time) of other
developers but do not seem to be willing to afford them any profits when or if
they do arrive. But in my mind, the whole idea is that Open Source is fluid and
doesn't necessarily work to a schedule. If you get lots of feature requests,
take it as validation for your work so far and plod along with what you are
doing. Accept input if you wish, or just write what you want - it is up to you
after all. You will soon see if what you are writing is interesting to
others simply by looking at the download rate. Possibly the best tact is to let
other developers contribute their ideas and work and make the end result as
organic as possible. No one expects Open Source to be delivered at any
particular time, or any particular feature to be present. Those that do need to
turn to for-fee software and take their chances there - although in my
experience it is not much better, if at all, in meeting schedules
or customer expectations - but that is what lawyers and contracts are for
after all!
I
would be interested to hear anyone else's opinions about
this.
Craig.
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