Isabel Drost wrote:
On Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:28:58 +0100
Steve Loughran <ste...@apache.org> wrote:
2. Even LGPL and GPL say no need to contribute back if you dont
distribute the code
Sorry in advance about the nitpicking: IANAL - but AFAIK even LGPL and
GPL do not force you to contribute back. The only thing that GPL does,
is forcing you to distribute the source code (including potential
modifications from your side) along with the binary you created*.
Good point. You only have to publish the source to the customers who
receive the binaries, not get the changes back in to the codebase.
If you run GPL code on your own servers, you aren't distributing it, so
the requirements to publish any source don't even kick in.
Now, the ASF license doesn't even require you to publish your changes.
Even so, because you end up taking on all maintenance costs -including
testing- it's not something I'd recommend. You might think because you
have put in six months worth of effort that your code is somehow better
-and it may be- but the value of that effort will evaporate unless you
keep investing effort merging the changes in with the code, and there is
a risk that other people who want the same feature will do something
different.
In the specific case of Hadoop, it is a very fast moving codebase, as
someone who does keep his own branch and updates it every few weeks, the
code split was pretty traumatic all round. Things have stopped moving
now, but it will have hurt everyone who branched. Whoever wrote an HA
namenode will not only have to deal with those changes, but the ongoing
extensions to the NN to improve recovery -the backup namenode, and other
implications.
I'm steering clear of all that, but I am trying to make it easier to
manage and configure the various services, so that you can bring them up
in different ways quite rapidly. Ideally I'd like every worker node to
handle the failure and migration of the master nodes far more gracefully
than today.
-steve
