The concern here seems to be about Autodesk creating a fork. Let me state for the record: we (Autodesk) have no interest in seeing this happen and no control to make this happen even if we did. None. The people in charge of MapServer today are the same people that were in charge a week ago. The license is the license. We will be minority voters on the board of the foundation. Where is the concern coming from?
The MySQL concern is a valid one. We struggled with it ourselves. At the end of the day, we would certainly like people to buy a commercial version with support, etc. But the fact is, they can use the community version of MSE and do what they want with it and not pay us a dime. Or they can use MapServer. Nothing we do - nothing - can stop this from being the case. In terms of our commercial goals - we're more interested in the RedHat model than the MySQL model, if that helps this to make any sense. We believe we and our partners can do well selling support and services on top of MapServer products. And we don't care which one they choose if they're working with us, though we'd like to see them value the work we did with MSE. Does this clarify things? Gary -----Original Message----- From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Attila Csipa Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 2:08 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] current OS license and the Source that lies ahead On Tuesday 29 November 2005 19:32, Charlton Purvis wrote: > state will always remain covered under the license below? Basically I'm > trying to make sure that a shop can't somehow repossess something that was > originally OS thus preventing folks from using it like it's being used now. I'm not a legal person so don't take this for granted, but as I understand it a license change cannot be retroactive (at least in most European countries I have experience with) without consent of both parties unless the original license was somehow flawed or legally unacceptable. This means that you could always use the code as per the license you got it with (eg the day before Autodesk or whoever came into the picture). I understand my few lines of crappy code in MapServer don't entitle me to make bold predictions and judgements, but my strong personal belief coming from my past experience is that Open Source Projects do not really exist without their communities, and I'm not sure the major software companies really get it - and only time will tell if Autodesk has gotten (or will get) it right with their old-new to be dual-license whatever-it's-called product. Having source available is one thing, but it's the Community that differentiates a real Open Source Project from (what I call) a Public project - something that is effectively funded by a single large entity hoping that people will get hooked on a 'free' version and eventually upgrade to their commercial versions. That would not be truly Open Source. That would be reinvention of the shareware concept of the early 90's. (Trolltech with QT comes to mind and MySQL seems to be going more and more in that direction). This brings us to one of the most debated points in Open Source development and the worst result of an unrecoverable split in any OS community - the bane of the Fork. I sincerely hope that it this never happens here and the crack that appeared from the way the Foundation was formed will fill up with time and the MapServer community will be as unified on the future of MapServer as it was before the announcement. Thank for your patience reading so far, I hope I have not hurt anybodys feelings, and if I have inadvertently done so, accept my apologies.
