Bruno,
I totally agree with your corporate view, an enterprise company must
carefully evaluate theses options, basing the decisions on TCO, risk and
laws, and not only on the superficial view of "free or not free".
On the other hand, imho I just think that this new context is not aligned
with most of the open source projects that I know.... because... let's
imagine... a few hundred dollars for an iText license as you said.... ok....
it might not be that much for a company or a project to afford, but usually
a system is composed of dozens of dependencies, if every responsible for
every dependency decides to do the same..... you can see where it's
going.... but that's ok, that's my opinion as you have yours... let's not
fight about that...
I'm not "yelling Fork!" I just wanted to understand more the context... just
that... please do not feel insulted, I'm aware of the heavy load that comes
with a fork...
Thanks for all the responses and the attention.
Regards
2010/9/23 Bruno Lowagie <[email protected]>
> On 23/09/2010 19:37, Ricardo Andre Redder Junior wrote:
>
>> I believe most of my questions are answered now... as I can see, whether
>> creating a fork is legal or not, it's very clear that if one decides to
>> create a fork, and keep working on the MPL version, will face an endless
>> legal battle, for IPs, for licenses, for package names, etc. and at the
>> end... probably the result would not be satisfactory. Thus... I'm sure
>> this kind of environment would be incompatible with an open source
>> project under MPL or LGPL...
>>
>> The biggest problem that I see is that open source projects, which have
>> LGPL (or something like that) as a strong requirement, i.e. changing to
>> AGPL is not even considered (I imagine Eclipse, Jasper, etc... are
>> examples of that) now... are without good options.
>>
>
> First of all: if you're talking about Eclipse, that's a project
> heavily sponsored by companies such as IBM (and the other members
> of the Eclipse Foundation). They could afford a license. Moreover, Eclipse
> doesn't accept LGPL: it demands EPL (with some exceptions).
>
> A second thing I want to point out: JasperReports can continue to
> use iText 5.+ and remain LGPL because they are good F/OSS citizens.
> We've made an agreement with JasperSoft. They understand reason (and so do
> we).
>
> The people yelling "Fork! Fork! Fork!" don't.
>
> As mentioned by Mark in reply to another mail: of biggest concern for the
> people who fork would be exactly how they obtain their fixes. If a problem
> is reported and we fix this code in version 5x, it would certainly be
> completely illegal and a complete violation of our IP if someone takes this
> fix and adapts it back to an older version.
> Unless, of course they adopt the AGPL for the fix and thus you have
> accomplished nothing.
>
> Perhaps people yelling "Fork!" are all unaware of what it takes to manage
> such a project, not only from the personal side in which multiple man years
> of effort are expended (Ohloh estimates that it would take 40 man years to
> build iText from scratch). On top of that, one also has to ensure that the
> IP is clean. Without this, corporate customers who wish to use the product
> run a very high risk of being sued for violation. If they decided to use an
> open source product, they would have no one to turn to because of a license
> like the LGPL which indemnifies the contributors.
>
> Tobias twisted my words making fun of "taking responsibility for iText
> 2.x". Of course NOBODY takes responsibility for the old version, but I've
> worked a full year in close cooperation with a battery of lawyers to clean
> up iText and to make an overview of the Intellectual Property, removing
> every single line of rogue code. That was not the most exciting year of my
> life, but the result is iText 5.+.
>
> That's F/OSS today. F/OSS used to be something run by hackers, nowadays
> every F/OSS company needs to have lawyers on its payroll.
>
> These types of things do not and will transfer with any fork. You merely
> have the LGPL license but that in itself provides no protection to corporate
> entities whatsoever. In my opinion, adopting iText would likely be
> diminished not increased. The actions of a few could likely cause the demise
> of all they think they are trying to benefit.
>
> And for what... the price for a license of iText? What corporation would
> balance the potential for multi-hundreds of thousands of dollar lawsuit
> against $2000 or whatever it might be. It will cost the company more than
> $2000 in legal fees to review the LGPL and its use in iText. It will cost
> the company more than that in time and effort to try to adopt, adapt, fix
> and maintain the fork. If people yelling "Fork" started to think with a
> corporate hat and not a developer's hat, they'd think differently.
>
> And now, on with the book: 15 chapters (good for 525 pages) have been
> typeset for the first time. While waiting for the final chapter (I've
> written 16 chapters), I've been reading and correcting 8 chapters.
> I almost fell from my chair when I read Tobias' remark saying documentation
> wasn't necessary...
>
> best regards,
> Bruno
>
--
*Ricardo A. Redder Jr.*
Product Engineering
Spring Wireless
Office: +55 (11) 3076-8342
Fax: +55 (11) 3472-7001
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E-mail: *[email protected]*
Skype: *ricardo.redder*
Site: www.springwireless.com
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*
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