Victor,
In not a lawyer, but from my point of view, how would paying a 580€
license help in my particular scenario? Does make it sense to pay and
not being capable of changing the code at all without going through
the GPL Derivative Work burden? And, in the hypothetical case that
would be possible, would I be paying to have permission to modify your
code? Is that called "encouraging collaboration and sharing"? And even
more, if some random open source developers spends a great effort in
improving jOpenDocument... would you be earning money from his work?
How much more ethical is that? And moreover, who would be the real
author/owner of jOpenDocument?
I understand your point of view, which is correct but IMHO you see
negative aspects and issues where there are none.
In your particular scenario, the "580€ licence" would solve all your issues:
- you will be able to include the lib in your application
- you will have the choice to send back or not the changes or
improvments you added
- you will have our support and then be sure you will not be stuck with
code you have no time to understand
The commercial licence give you the right to modify and use the library
as you want, so you ARE "capable of changing the code at all without
going through the GPL Derivative Work burden".
To sum up, the cost to modify the code if your code is GPL compliant
is 0 €,
but the cost to modify the code if your code is "closed" is 580 €
(580$ being something like 1€ for the licence and 579€ for the included
support).
The GPL is by nature an ultra collaborating and "forced" sharing
licence, it made the success of Linux and MySQL.
If some random open source developers spends a great effort in improving
jOpenDocument... they will be paid as we are:
0 € if people use the GPL version
and maybe millions of $ if they can sell their "SuperJOpenDocument"
library or support on it.
The owner of jOpenDocument source code is... jOpenDocument, so if you
decide to contribute back to the GPL branch your code will be integrated.
Furthermore, a full week of work from an engineer is worth more than
those 580€, so I think that anyone creating new features or bugfixings
for jOpenDocument is more worth than any license your could sell. It
wouldn't be fair asking for 580€ when your get in return 50.000€ in
returns from new features, enhacements, bugfixings and refactors.
We never had to face such case, but when someone will contact us with
such "patch" and will ask for LGPL we will reconsider our position or
include their part as LGPL or BSD ....
In real life, application developer are so happy they only had to pay
580€ + their 50.000€ instead of spending time and 250.000€
if they had to redevelop everything, that they are glad to help the
project and the community.
You can see in that case, jOpenDocument as a cost killer.
As we mentioned on the website, the 580 € will be invested in
jOpenDocument development.
I see. So if some user wants a new feature, he will be paying 580€ for
it (assuming you'll accept the enhancement request). Is it really one
week of full work worth that?
It worth it just because an enhancement will benefit every user of the
library.
And just one last thought. jOpendocument has become widespread toolkit
for ODF manipulation. How big do you want it to be? How many potential
users could it have lost because of unappropriated licensing? How many
of them has discarded its usage and went for another alternative (such
as ODFToolkit) just because of licensing problems?
In theory you are right, but to be frank with you, I can count on one
hand the number of known "lost users".
Regards,
Guillaume
