on 8/2/2000 9:41 AM, "David Li" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I am not sure where the perception comes from. From the $99 packaged
> Enhydra banner on Slashdot, perhaps?
If I was going to sell Turbine, I wouldn't call it "Turbine". Of course the
ASF license wouldn't let me, but the main concern in my mind would be the
impression it would give to all the people in the CONTRIB.txt file if I just
took Turbine and all of their hard work and sold it as Turbine without
contributing any of the money back to them.
> One thing about contributing to a BSD/AFS project is that some big guy
> may extend and package my contribution without giving me back the
> source. Something like MPL or LGPL would at least give me more
> protection in my contribution. GPL would be the ideal license for me as
> a individual.
Who cares if they don't give it back? I sure don't. The real idea is to
build enough positive community around the code base that giving back
because instinct instead of some forced thing in a license. I think we have
done an exceptionally good job of that in this project. Look at all the
contributions by all of the people. People these days are missing out on the
fact that OSS is about community...sites like sourceforge are simply the
geocities of project hosting and really do nothing to encourage building
community around the projects because there are just to many of them. There
is so much duplication up there it is silly.
> However, in our quest to build an open source software company, we found
> GPL isn't the best. We build the company arround the RMS' manifesto
> about open source. We provide open source software based professional
> service and develop codes to glue these togehter for our clients. Not
> many clients can accept GPL, especially when some of these codes involve
> their business rules.
Think of it this way: A company like RHAT thrives on the GPL because they
are a market leader and it ends up actually helping them because their
competitors _have_ to help them out. Essentially, it becomes a game of "who
can take other people's patches and merge them into our code base the
fastest?" I think that is something the GPL encourages and I think that
sucks.
> In the business side, we prefer to use software under MPL or LGPL. On
> one hand, it protects our contribution to the community. On the other,
> the clients are more likely to accept those license terms.
What exactly are you trying to protect? I think that there is this misnomer
about having to actually protect things.
> This is not perfect but it's better than doing propritery programs in
> days and hacking open source at night. We can at least make working on
> open source software our day jobs.
I agree, but I think that you should take a long hard look at the licenses
you are choosing and *WHY*. Question *WHY* you want to protect the software.
What you are willing to give up as a result.
-jon
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