I hate (especially in my first posting to your site, and my first comment on one of your blogs) to bring up the tired old quasi-religious war between the GPL and the MIT/BSD/Apache style of licenses. But your plea for giving back forces the question out there.
I believe, from our conversations, that you prefer the BSD style of licensing. But the main argument of GPL proponents is that it makes sure enhancements return to the community.
Naturally, companies build new tools on top of GPL'd code and keep them proprietary. So even if every open source project adopted the GPL, your question about giving back and your plea for helping the community would be relevant.
Furthermore, the whole ASP issues is treated ambiguously by the FSF, and ASPs are permitted (wisely) by GPLv3.
So I suppose good intentions and good faith are always needed, but the question does pertain to licensing too.
http://www.praxagora.com/andyo/
GPL requirements != playing nicely
Posted by
Ton Voon
at
2007-04-19 04:30
GPLv2 only stipulates that you must distribute your modifications to GPLv2 code to your customers. There is nothing in there about giving code back to the original maintainers.
However, those same customers, under rights given by GPLv2, now have the right to redistribute that modified code, so they could make that available to the original maintainers or anyone else. I think it is this viral clause that makes the GPLv2 such a brilliant legal document.
Companies that do not provide their changes to their customers are breaking the GPL and deserve exposure and vilification. This is the *minimum* requirement of playing in the GPLv2 field.
Yet, it is *not* a GPLv2 requirement to give changes back to the community. However, if you "play nicely", your organisation will garner a lot more respect and be more closely aligned with the core projects if you do. Everyone wins in this scenario and you reduce your risk of being vilified.
I gave a speech at the Nagios Conference in Germany last year (http://www.netways.de/de/nagios_konferenz/archiv_2006/programm/open_source_etiquette/) where I argued that it makes good business sense to give your changes back. And I want my company, Altinity (http://altinity.com), to be an example (http://altinity.org) of how you can play well (http://source.altinity.org) in the open source field, specifically for Nagios.
You can't license community
Posted by
Decibel
at
2007-04-19 04:13
I can legally scowl at my neighbors every time I see them. I can spit on their sidewalk. I can do all kinds of things to be a bad neighbor, and it's all legal.
Likewise, simply putting a GPL license on your open source software doesn't mean that the people using it are going to contribute back, as you mentioned.
But what so many people fail to recognize is that the true power of OSS isn't about the software at all; it's about the ability to bring so many incredible minds to bear on a problem. That has nothing to do with license, and everything to do with culture. In some ways, the GPL actually stifles that culture, because it tends to attract people who feel no one should be allowed to make money from the efforts of the community, while BSD'd projects tend to be more more supportive and understanding of companies that turn their work into a commercial product.
By the way, in my (biased) opinion, I think a great example of how "Open Community" should work is how EnterpriseDB has been working with the PostgreSQL community on features for the upcoming 8.3 release. There's a number of very complicated features being added that are certainly better because of the collaboration than they would have been had either the community or EnterpriseDB gone it alone.
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I believe, from our conversations, that you prefer the BSD style of licensing. But the main argument of GPL proponents is that it makes sure enhancements return to the community.
Naturally, companies build new tools on top of GPL'd code and keep them proprietary. So even if every open source project adopted the GPL, your question about giving back and your plea for helping the community would be relevant.
Furthermore, the whole ASP issues is treated ambiguously by the FSF, and ASPs are permitted (wisely) by GPLv3.
So I suppose good intentions and good faith are always needed, but the question does pertain to licensing too.
http://www.praxagora.com/andyo/
However, those same customers, under rights given by GPLv2, now have the right to redistribute that modified code, so they could make that available to the original maintainers or anyone else. I think it is this viral clause that makes the GPLv2 such a brilliant legal document.
Companies that do not provide their changes to their customers are breaking the GPL and deserve exposure and vilification. This is the *minimum* requirement of playing in the GPLv2 field.
Yet, it is *not* a GPLv2 requirement to give changes back to the community. However, if you "play nicely", your organisation will garner a lot more respect and be more closely aligned with the core projects if you do. Everyone wins in this scenario and you reduce your risk of being vilified.
I gave a speech at the Nagios Conference in Germany last year (http://www.netways.de/de/nagios_konferenz/archiv_2006/programm/open_source_etiquette/) where I argued that it makes good business sense to give your changes back. And I want my company, Altinity (http://altinity.com), to be an example (http://altinity.org) of how you can play well (http://source.altinity.org) in the open source field, specifically for Nagios.
Likewise, simply putting a GPL license on your open source software doesn't mean that the people using it are going to contribute back, as you mentioned.
But what so many people fail to recognize is that the true power of OSS isn't about the software at all; it's about the ability to bring so many incredible minds to bear on a problem. That has nothing to do with license, and everything to do with culture. In some ways, the GPL actually stifles that culture, because it tends to attract people who feel no one should be allowed to make money from the efforts of the community, while BSD'd projects tend to be more more supportive and understanding of companies that turn their work into a commercial product.
By the way, in my (biased) opinion, I think a great example of how "Open Community" should work is how EnterpriseDB has been working with the PostgreSQL community on features for the upcoming 8.3 release. There's a number of very complicated features being added that are certainly better because of the collaboration than they would have been had either the community or EnterpriseDB gone it alone.