Richard, On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 9:43 AM, Richard Lawrence <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On a somewhat-related note, this morning's /. has an article about "why > the economic crisis will favor FLOSS" from RedHat's CEO: > > http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/21/0116221 > > No killer insights there, but maybe someone on this list can offer one? > (I, personally, should be safe in my Ivory Tower job...) I think he's right that FOSS will benefit from an economic downturn, for better or for worse. However, these sorts of discussions put the focus on cost reduction which is only one small part of what FOSS is all about. Also, I don't think Red Hat specifically will benefit as much as FOSS in general from an economic downturn. Red Hat sells a premium product/service at a premium price. As an example of this, Oracle Unbreakable Linux has had little, if any, effect on Red Hat's sales. > > As for your licensing scheme, Bradley: I guess I don't quite see the > advantage a BSD license offers. Is it just that it is consistent with > the Zend licensing, and that there are no problems if your clients need > to, say, link your code with proprietary libraries? Or do you think a > BSD license encourages people to contribute to FLOSS more than another > license? Good questions. To explain, I need to walk you through our thought process. First, we made the decision to license software instead of transfer copyright on this software. This allows us to reuse components and reduce costs because we don't have to rebuild everything from scratch for every project. Second, what kind of license to use? We could make up our own license that gave our clients what they needed as well as give us adequate protection from liability. In fact, this is what we used to do. However, there were various restrictions in our license that started to become problematic. For example, one restriction was that it could only be used on one server - well, what about cloud computing? The first thought was to updated our license when we ran up against these restrictions. The problem with this approach is that there could be many updates to the license as various technologies changed and having a lawyer review the license each time would be expensive (or we'd be opening ourselves up to liability by not having a lawyer look at it). Then the thought occurred, why not just use a FOSS license? Do we really care about restricting our clients usage of the software? Do we really care about not letting our clients redistribute the software if they so choose? The answers to these questions was that we didn't care. In fact, giving these freedoms to our clients creates more value for them and that could actually translate into more revenue for us. From a client's perspective, it's the next best thing to a full copyright transfer. The two choices we considered where the GPL or the New BSD License. These are licenses that have been used by many organizations and have a long history. Discussions about which one is "better" can lead to some serious flame wars, so I'm only going to talk about why we made the decision we did and I am making no claim about one being "better" than the other (so please put away your flame-throwers and flame-retardent suites). Both give the licensee the four freedoms<http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html>as outlined by the Free Software Foundation. The GPL is a copyleft license that forces the software to stay free (as in freedom, not cost) using some legal judo. The New BSD License allows a licensee to make the software proprietary and take away these freedoms if they so choose. For this reason, the New BSD License is considered more "business friendly" (for better or for worse). Since we get paid to create web sites and web applications for our clients we recognized that this is an option that our clients would value (even though we hope they don't exercise this option). Do I think the New BSD License encourages people to contrubte to FOSS more than other licenses? Sorry, I'm not going to take the bait on this one (see my comment about flame wars above). The point of our licensing choice had nothing to do with encouraging contribution to FOSS - it was simply to give our clients as much freedom over the software we build for them as possible. Sure, they could turn around and contribute to FOSS themselves, but this is unlikely (afterall, they're hiring us to build their web application) and beside the point (but they do have the freedom to do this with the license we've given them). Thanks, Bradley > > Richard > > Bradley Holt wrote: > > In an earlier discussion I talked about how I think VAGUE is relevant > > and can influence local businesses. As I said before, free/open source > > software is something that is very important to me and I think VAGUE is > > in a position to be an educator to local businesses on FOSS. Our small > > business (four employees) develops web sites and web applications (among > > other services). We recently made the decision to license all of our > > software that we deliver to clients under the New BSD License - a FOSS > > license. > > > > There are a number of reasons for this decision that I've explained here: > > > http://bradley-holt.blogspot.com/2008/10/found-line-software-license.html > > > > Since I made the statement that I think VAGUE is relevant to local > > businesses, then I felt it was only right to ask for feedback on this > > decision from the VAGUE mailing list ;-) > > > > So, fire away - what are your thoughts on this idea? > > > > Thanks, > > Bradley > > > > -- > > http://bradley-holt.blogspot.com/ > -- http://bradley-holt.blogspot.com/
