Don Brady wrote:
In my opinion, though, Apache surely made a mistake, by allowing such things in their license. It pretty well ensures that their project will not survive.
I dunno, Don... from what I've seen on their mailing list and website, the Axis project seems pretty active to me. Actually, I've been thinking a lot lately about getting involved with Axis myself (which is why I subscribe to their "dev" list, which gets quite a bit of traffic).
DO you thing that opens-source programmers program in order to have their source code later survive mainly in proprietary implementations for which no source is available?
I think that depends on the individual. If I write any code that goes into an open-source project, I'll be doing it for my own purposes, whatever that may be. It's entirely possible, given my personality and outlook on things, that I would have no problem with a for-profit company taking the project code and making a proprietary offering out of it.
In the case of Axis, IBM apparently contributed quite a bit to the project... so later they walk away... Ok, but the code / time / whatever the contributed hasn't been lost or taken away. The other people involved in Axis are still quite free to continue on, taking full advantage of whatever IBM contributed up until the point the left.
If I were working on a FOSS project and something like that that happened, I honestly would not be upset. In fact, I'd be grateful for whatever contributions the "big company" made. But, that's just me. Like I said, every individual has a different outlook on it.
That said, I do understand why some Axis contributors *would* be upset at the turn of events. But, like you said, the license allows what happened, and presumably the people who joined the Axis project knew the terms of the license when they began contributing, so it seems that the criticism of IBM can only go so far in that case...
The nice thing is, we have a nice choices of licenses to pick from, for FOSS developers to use. For the die-hard GPL'ers, there is the GPL/LGPL, and for people who are more in the Open Source camp, there are the MIT / X / Apache / BSD style licenses.
Anyway, that's enough rambling from me... it's way past my bedtime anyway. :-)
TTYL,
Phil
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