Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
there are many ways to describe the spirit of the apache community, but there is one that I like more than all the others: "we care about people more than we care about code".
Well then, we are on the same philosophical ground! :)
Great :-)
Now. You, as the author and copyright holder, have the freedom to modify licensing at any time and for whatever reason. Here, nobody will tell you what's good or bad for you, you know that better than we all do.
As I said in another message, I'm going to ponder the issues (again) this weekend. I appreciate the detailed responses, though.
You are mostly welcome.
There was some negative vibe going on, but we all understand that you didn't realize many of the legal implications of your move.
Now for apache pretending and not giving back.
telnet www.coyotegulch.com 80 Trying 64.70.152.229... Connected to coyotegulch.com. Escape character is '^]'. HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 22:11:31 GMT Server: Apache Connection: close Content-Type: text/html
Point taken, though given the complexity of my personal website, I could probably use just about any web server.
Sure. And, with all due respect, given the community we have, we could rewrite Jisp if we really wanted. It's not exactly rocket science.
I don't do much server-side work anymore; my specialty is high-performance and numeric applications. I suspect Apache has more than its share of experts on parallel coding and optimization...
no, not really :-) But there is room for some for sure!
That given, I'll consider what everyone's said. I'll do a bit more research and thinking.
Many thanks indeed.
As for your experience with companies not paying you back:
The ASF counts 840 committers. Thinking that all of them are college kids with a bunch of free time or really rich people that don't need to work to make a living, well, it's statistically very poor as an assumption.
This community in particular has many companies that started and make profit out of seeling their knowhow to people. I used to do this myself.
But selling yourself is an art and pretending that a software license will do that for you is just very naive (with all due respect).
Removing my cocoon hat now, my suggestion, if you were asking me personally for advice, would be to donate the code to the ASF.
This would allow:
1) the creation of a community around it (means you don't have to do the maintainance yourself!)
2) keep all apache projects happy
3) keep your name attached to it forever (means free advertising)
The situation you are finding yourself into is a common one: a personal project that is successful and is used. Since there is no community, no mail list, not CVS, people bug you personally and this is frustrating and feels abusive.
I know what that means, my name is attached to many very popular java projects and I still get questions for Ant, JMeter, JServ and the like even if I stopped working on those projects years ago. My answer is almost always "ask the appropriate mail list". But you can't do that now.
The ASF was created exactly to wrap code with communities and protect indiviuals from lawsuits and general abuse, even private abuse like the one you have experienced.
Of course, at that point, even protected, this won't solve your marketing for you or the way you sell yourself to companies. In short, you are on your own for that and you can be successful or suck. We have examples of both kinds in the ASF.
But again, going the GPL way will lock you out of the ASF world, this means loosing all the visibility you had before.
I'm not saying this is good or bad, the choice is yours.
At the same time, you could find lots of reasonable people with very much in common with you that might help you in many ways in case you feel like joining forces.
-- Stefano.
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
