Starting a new thread here. On 22.08.2014, at 17:48 , Hubert Figuière <[email protected]> wrote: > On 22/08/14 09:09 AM, Hanno Schlichting wrote: >> "At this stage the service is open to anyone, who wants to contribute back >> to the service, non-commercial open-source applications and users who more >> generally support the Mozilla mission.”
Please note that this policy is very much a work in progress. It’s not set in stone and we can improve it, based on feedback. > It is sad that you put "non-commercial" and "open source" in the same > sentence. It can't be open-source if the "non-commercial" aspect (which > is still too broad of a definition) is required. > > By essence the basic freedom of open-source is not restricting the usage > of said source code. Be it OSI Open Source definition or GNU Free > Software definition. It seems the policy should be improved, as you are reading a much more general statement into it, than what it is meant to convey. The policy currently has two parts. I think the non-controversial part is about active contributors to the service. If you contribute to the service in some fashion, than you should be able to use it in return. Details of what exactly that means are tricky, but we take those on a case-by-case basis, building up rules as we go along and get presented with concrete examples. The other part I added was a notion of being freely accessible to a broader audience, in the form of Mozilla mission aligned projects and non-commercial open-source projects. Personally I felt that as Mozilla it’s in our nature to support and subsidize those kinds of projects. But there has to be some line, where we cannot just run the online service for everyone for free. Running the service has a real cost both in terms of people and operational expenses and those increase with the number of users. If someone contributes nothing back to the service, we’d simply take some cost and subsidize their effort without getting anything in return. Let’s say someone writes a commercial app, sells it to users and wants to use our service for free. I think it makes no sense to give them free access to the online service. Of course we’ll publish the aggregated cell data sets soon, so that person could download the data and run their own service based on it. Would that situation change if that person also happens to publish their code as open-source, but nobody uses it and they continue to have practically a commercial app? I felt that we need a tighter rule here. Using the non/commercial attribute was the simplest I could think of that draws a clearer line here. If you have suggestions on different criteria, please share them. Thanks, Hanno _______________________________________________ dev-geolocation mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-geolocation
