Hunsberger, Peter wrote:
Fair enough; reading between the lines, I guess you're partly saying that prior versions of Jisp weren't robust enough to be readily adopted by a community?
Jisp began life as an accidental product. People found it in my books, and asked to license it. The book code was demonstrative; it had never been tested. Over the course of several years, I patched the code as best I could, but finally decided that the underlying core had serious flaws. Thus I did a major rewrite used by my few commercial customers, but not released as free code.
As I've moved away from writing books (too much work for too little money), Jisp has taken on a new role as an advertisement. As such, I released the commercial version as free software (version 3.0), under the GPL and commercial license to emphasize that this is a product and not some hobbiest's weekend hack.
Wish I could put my money where my mouth is on this issue (so to speak);
at this point I have to drop out of the discussion...
As is usual in life, the best people tend to have the least money. :)
I would *love* to spend time working on projects like Apache -- but I haven't the luxury of free time. Do I think people can make money from working on free software? Certainly -- my primary contract right now is to write free software for a big British company (heh, they're outsourcing to America).
And while money is nice, I'm also willing to consider various designs for mutually-beneficial arrangements.
Scott,
By and large the people here recognize your right (and everyone's right) to do what you want with your code. I appreciate your quandry and position. Apache projects (at least this one) have their own "religion" valuing community - but not all projects translate well to community ownership. There may be some very real benefits to a community like Cocoon to avoid single-person projects because they have a risk of "disappearing" either by license change or by "retirement" etc. Of course these or similar risks exist in community-based projects, as well as pure commercial projects. I personally have been bitten by all three of these poisons as have many here. All that to say, I hope we haven't gotten off on the wrong foot here. Thanks for joining in the discussion directly, and don't let our liveliness turn you off.
I'll add a brief comment and suggestion on the license-related thread.
Geoff
