Hi FreeRDP developers,
After long and careful reflexion regarding the license change of FreeRDP, I
made my final decision:
*FreeRDP 0.9 and later versions will be released under the Apache License
2.0*
More details about the license can be found here:
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html
I have contacted some of you personally to get your input regarding the
license change, and what I got was stronger support for Apache License 2.0
than for LGPL/GPL. Some of you do not necessarily agree with the license
choice, but are still willing to comply and continue with us.
If you go on the FreeRDP website, you will see that it still shows the
original mission statement that was written when the project was started:
*FreeRDP is a fork of the rdesktop project that intends to rapidly start
moving forward and implement features that rdesktop lacks the most.*
I still remember writing those lines in plain HTML to put on
freerdp.sourceforge.net as a placeholder, before taking the time to build a
better website. A lot has changed since then, a lot. I'll be honest with
you: when I wrote those lines, I wasn't expecting that the project would
grow and become what it is now. I was hoping that it would, but in no way I
was *expecting* it to happen. Well, it happened, and I am truly excited
about the way things go. I wish to thank all of you for making this a
reality.
If the original intent was mostly targeting rdesktop, the new intent aims at
much higher goals on the long term. I wish to make FreeRDP a much larger
project aiming at providing a de-facto standard implementation of RDP. One
argument that came in the discussion was that for this to happen, it must be
obvious that we provide the best implementation of RDP. Well, there aren't
that many implementations around, and judging from the interest FreeRDP is
currently getting we can certainly make this happen.
This new long term goal for the project comes at a price. I do not believe
we would be able to reach this goal using a reciprocal software license, or
one that is often called viral. A free software license should help a
project grow, not stand in its way. No, in order to become a de-facto
standard implementation, we must move to permissive licensing that would
make the software usable in the largest possible number of licensing
scenarios. If we stick to LGPL/GPL, we will be restricting the possible
licensing scenarios with permissive licenses, and we will also be imposing
strong restrictions for proprietary licensing. How could we possibly aim at
becoming a widely accepted de-facto standard implementation if we impose
such restrictions?
I understand the fear of having companies write their own code that they
would not contribute back. From what I've heard, there are many GPL
violations related to rdesktop. Yes, we could stay in GPL and try to
pressure people not willing to comply into releasing the source code, but
for which purpose? You need to think that this code is probably very
unclean, hackish and specific to a certain context. We should be focusing on
working with people that want to collaborate, not focusing on going after
those who do not want to. Believe me, there are companies who would be
willing to join their efforts into FreeRDP if we were to switch to a
permissive license. After all, free software does fall pretty well within
their business model: when you build a thin client, what matters the most is
getting the cheaper product at the highest quality possible. If everybody
gets better software to start with, they can focus on making the rest much
better. It's a win-win situation.
By the way, if I really feared getting my source code "stolen", I wouldn't
have started this project. People are making money off my source code, and
it is perfectly fine with me. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making
money off open source software. I think there are sufficient companies with
commercial interests in the software that would be willing to allocate
resources that it is definitely the way to go.
Of course, I wouldn't be telling you that if I didn't have something
specific in mind. I've had a long talk with Jay the other day, and we
brought back an idea which we had for a long time: we would like to create
some sort of "FreeRDP Foundation" or at least a legal entity to represent
the project. We have good contacts within the industry that we can go to and
try to get involved with the project. We do not know the specifics of it
yet, but that *will* happen if we switch to Apache License 2.0, I promise.
Another possibility that was discussed between me and Jay would be to change
the license of xrdp and merge it with the FreeRDP project. I don't think we
should merge the sources, but FreeRDP would become a project consisting of a
client and a server. I think that the FreeRDP long term growth is strongly
linked with the availability of a good RDP server implementation.
Now, since this is a license change, I cannot just go a relicense code from
copyright holders that do not agree to the license change. After talking to
most of you, I got the assurance that we were almost at consensus on the
question. In fact, the only person I didn't ask personally was probably
Otavio, because he's made his opinion very clear. I got a positive response
from everybody I contacted personally. I do not want this to get personal:
if you value more the license than the project itself, then it is your
choice, not mine. If we really have to get to that, we will simply have to
remove the copyrighted code that we cannot relicense and move on. It is a
small harm on the short term, but it will benefit on the long term. Code
contributions, even if useful, are simply not worth sacrificing the fate of
the entire project, especially when I got support from most of you. Remember
that me and Jay are the ones leading this project. I wouldn't be making this
decision if I wasn't convinced that it was for the good of the project on
the long term.
If you choose to leave, please know that I will respect your choice and
comply to copyright law by simply removing the copyrighted code that wasn't
agreed to be relicensed. No hard feelings, it is just the way things are.
However, I strongly advise not to do it, since we'd like to keep as much
people into the adventure of FreeRDP, even if there are some disagreements.
We can't please everybody, that's for sure.
Anyway, let's get this over with as soon as possible so we can focus on
making FreeRDP the best RDP implementation ever :)
Thanks again everyone for making FreeRDP what it is today, it is truly
appreciated.
Best regards,
- Marc-Andre
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The ultimate all-in-one performance toolkit: Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE:
Pinpoint memory and threading errors before they happen.
Find and fix more than 250 security defects in the development cycle.
Locate bottlenecks in serial and parallel code that limit performance.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devfeb
_______________________________________________
Freerdp-devel mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freerdp-devel
