The goals are to be a broadly adopted, high-quality PIM on all platforms, and to ensure that Chandler is always available on an open source basis to those who want it. We also hope to generate a piece of the funding that will be necessary to make Chandler development self-sufficient. OSAF is a non-profit organization, so there is no "return on investment" goal. But we do need a way to sustain ourselves.
Your point that a database is much more likely to be distributed as part of a larger application is very well taken. The potential revenue for Chandler may be much smaller since it is intended as a useful application in and of itself. On the other hand, we're not looking for big profits, only self-sufficiency. I am acutely interested in any ideas for a different focus which you might have.
Mitchell
Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
Mitchell Baker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
The Open Source Applications Foundation (http://www.osafoundation.org)
is planning the 0.1 release of Chandler (a personal information
manager) shortly, hopefully by the end of April. OSAF's plan of
record for licensing is to follow the model used by MySQL: recipients
must either (a) make their entire application available under the GPL
or other approved open source license, or (b) get a commercial license
from OSAF. I'm very interested in the thinking of this group about
this model. The plan is reasonably firm but not set in stone, so I'd
appreciate hearing about potential pitfalls as well as benefits.
I think the discussion might be more focused if you say what your goals are. Then we can compare the licensing plan to those goals.
If your goal is to be the dominant PIM on free software platforms, then copying MySQL's licensing seems reasonable.
It's worth noting that MySQL is only mildly useful by itself, and is normally part of a larger application. I would have thought that a PIM would be quite useful by itself, and would not normally be part of a larger application. So focusing on forcing people to release their entire application may miss the point. Or, more likely, I have missed the point.
Ian
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