This is only my view. I certainly support anyone's right to release their work under whatever license they deem most beneficial to themselves and Open Source Strategies has been very generous in giving back to the OFBiz community, this is not a knock on them, simply the license. In regards to HPL and GPL, without getting into the specifics of each, most projects are kind of hypocritical with their stance on parasites. Almost without exception HPL and GPL licensed projects are born out of a project with a BSD/MIT/Apache license. By releasing their modifications to those projects under GPL or HPL, they're saying "we reserve the right to be parasites to those projects, but won't allow others to be parasites to ours".
As I understand it, while there is not a "no commercial use clause" in the HPL, the effect is of one. If you're running a website and the website's code is HPL, then you're under obligation to release the source of your website, even your modifications. If that is the case, your website is severely limited in its ability to be a competitive advantage. No competitive advantage, might as well be no commercial use. ----- Original Message ---- From: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, October 12, 2007 11:12:58 AM Subject: RE: We're Hiring! David This is the second refence to the HPL in the last few days where you have expressed your unhappiness with it. I have read it through several times and can find nothing onerous in it (unlike the no commercial use clauses in some). While I find the Apache license ideal, I myself get rather aggrevated when people use this Apache Licensed software for their commercial enterprises and never contribute anything back. I consider them to be parasites. Anyway, can you describe specifically what you are not comfortable with in case I have missed some lawyer stuff? Skip
