Si,
I guess my reply off-line was not sufficient or you didn't want to discuss it there. That's fine, I prefer a public forum anyway.
Comments in-line: On Apr 23, 2007, at 10:05 AM, Si Chen wrote:
This is not true.The agreement in question covered the disposition of a list of files from the old accountingext repository. It stated that a subset of the files from that repository would be released under the GPL after all copyright had been transferred to us (Open Source Strategies, Inc.)
The text is actually fairly small and simple: "6. OSSI agrees to release the Exhibit B Files under the GNU General Public License (GPL) in addition to any other commercial software licenses under which it may intend to release them."
It did not commit us to creating a new repository or module,
Correct.
undertaking any further enhancement to those files,
Yep.
or releasing future versions of those files.
True as well.
Those files were already released under the GPL, and we have satisfied all the terms of the agreement.
You're right the files were released under the GPL licensed. The original release of those is fine.
The tricky part is when the license changed, which the agreement had no provision for, so it would be done under the terms of the GPL. That code was GPL licensed and the GPL requires changes and modifications to be licensed under the GPL, or a "compatible" license. There is a lot of debate, because of this requirement, about which licenses are GPL-compatible (ie which ones you can use for your changes to GPL code in order to avoid licensing them under the GPL).
Let's say HPL was GPL-compatible (I don't know if this is the case or not). That would mean that any additions or changes to the original files could be HPL licensed, but the contents of the original files would still need to be GPL licensed.
That said, I really don't care so much about this issue. Unless something changes we (Undersun) are not going to push this issue as there is no benefit that we can see to doing so.
In fact, I'm not even sure what the problem or concern is, and why we are even having this discussion. Still, I hope this clarifies my thought on it for anyone reading in who might be concerned about it.
Also, in general, this has NOTHING to do with OFBiz. It is 100% about a code base that is not at all part of OFBiz. So, I also apologize to those who are reading this mailing list because they are interested in OFBiz itself.
-David
David E. Jones wrote:Actually it's more complicated than that... Technically Open Source Strategies has a signed contract to license the financials module at least under the GPL license because of the history of the early development of it, so they shouldn't be distributing it under the HPL license. We haven't pushed them on that, but that is in a real legal document. The crmsfa one on the other hand is not so encumbered.-David
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