Hi Botond, On behalf of the Loggly family I would like you to know how much we appreciate the work that you and your collaborators have been doing. The loud voices of those who don't appreciate the "deal" of OSS shouldn't get you down. There are many more of us who know how hard it is to do what you have been doing.
As you may know, we've adopted a strategy to not supply forwarding agents with our service because we want to support the best of what is already available and in use. And so we are completely dependent on solutions like nxlog. It sounds like you are operating with very little support. Perhaps we could do something to support you and the team. Please contact me directly if you have potential interest. In the meantime, thank you. Regards, Charlie Oppenheimer CEO Loggly -----Original Message----- From: Botond Botyanszki [mailto:b...@nxlog.org] Sent: Tuesday, October 01, 2013 8:11 AM To: nxlog-ce-users Subject: [nxlog-ce-users] licensing Dear nxlog users, I feel that I should elaborate a bit more on our licensing situation concerning the project. There were several issues recently which triggered this, including the discussion in the other thread titled "Compiling nxlog for Windows". First I must admit that I have been a great fan of the open source movement in the past 15 years. During this time I contributed to various other projects (including the linux kernel) and had my personal hobby projects as well. As the open source movement got popular in recent years with the commercialization of linux and various other tools in the same ecosystem, I see more and more people and companies trying to take advantage of this without contributing anything back and without caring about the future of that particular open source codebase they use and which contributes to their success and profit. This abusive attitude can be also seen on various forums, mailing lists where users demand support and if they don't get any FREE help they get upset. Personally I have tried to ignore such behavior, unfortunately recently this has reached such a level that we started to think about and are now considering alternative approaches to the present dual licensing model of nxlog. Often times I talk in plural and say "we". While the nxlog project may seem like a one-man show, this is not actually the case as we have a company behind (two in fact) with several other employees who support, test and contribute to our products, including the nxlog community edition, directly and indirectly. It takes quite a lot of resources to be able to help keep the project moving forward. To be able to add new features, fix bugs and make new releases we have to power our computers. Electricity costs money. We have to eat in order not to starve. Food costs money. I'm sure this is not a surprise to you. What may be a surprise is that the nxlog community edition has not generated income that could cover these expenses. In fact, that income in the past 2 years did not reach four digits USD. We have other sources of income from various customers (as we are not drug dealers though) and this is what kept the project alive so far. Thus, to be able to make a living we have to work for our paying customers. Everything else is second, including the nxlog community edition. Unfortunately we are not alone with this as there are a lot of companies struggling with the same problem, including the companies behind other open source logging tools. To be more specific about the abusive attitude of users I'll list some cases that I personally think harms us and the project in various ways: * There is evidence on the internet, including fragments of modified nxlog code, that indicate it's being used by various companies to build their products without releasing modifications or supporting the nxlog project in any form (monetary or other). * There are several users who subscribe to this mailing list and ask for help. Once they receive the answer they immediately unsubscribe without even sending a single "thank you", if at least in person. Is that so hard? * Except for the notable few exceptions, there are very few users who help others on the list. Smells like they have only subscribed to gather knowledge and get help for their own case. Not a true community spirit. * There are users who subscribe without a real name using anonymous gmail accounts. Either their are ashamed of begging for help while working at a large multinational company and prefer to remain unidentifiable or are just simply cowards. While they are free to post this way, it makes me think whether I would want to help such people. * So far there has been no notable external contribution to the project (patches, new modules, scripts, tutorials, documentation) except for some suggestions, advices, bug reports and typo corrections which I highly appreciate. * There are users who admittedly use the nxlog community edition to collect logs in large enterprise environments from hundreds of windows servers, collect logs from various not so cheap applications (e.g. oracle) and such. There is a clear note in several places on the websites which states that we are able to offer commercial support. When this has been offered, most didn't even bother to send a "no thanks" response and are clearly here for the free lunch. They are free to do so. On the other hand probably it wouldn't take much effort to convince their procurement to support the project or buy at least one hour of commercial support. To make the long story short, I'm not begging for money. I just want to make sure people understand our situation so that they don't abuse the project and demand free labor. On the other hand as I noted earlier, we are considering a license change that will help push the project forward on the long term. This could be some other open source license, or we may opt to release nxlog as freeware only. Rest assured that there will be at least a free (as in beer) edition in the future covering the present functionality. If you have some advice, feedback or suggestions regarding the subject I'd be happy to hear from you, either on list or contacting me directly. Thanks for reading, Botond -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60134791&iu=/4140/ostg.clktr k _______________________________________________ nxlog-ce-users mailing list nxlog-ce-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nxlog-ce-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60134791&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ nxlog-ce-users mailing list nxlog-ce-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nxlog-ce-users
