Josh Hayes-Sheen said the following on 11/30/2010 02:00 PM:
On Nov 30, 3:49 am, "Peter J. Farrell"<[email protected]> wrote:
We discussed a long time about Apache versus GPL in regards to Mach-II.
The classpath exception we include literally gives the ability to bundle
with any commercial project as it stops the GPL license seeping into
your commercial code base.
I think this is actually a really good solution, I know the concern of
the GPL 'Infecting' software is a real issue for many companies and I
don't blame them, As someone who's both a user and a developer the GPL
is fickle, it giveth and it taketh away :S
In this case where clearly defined public extension points are document
(either through inheritance or cfinclude), GPL v3 with a classpath
exception list works extremely well.
In case you are wondering, we have a FAQ about the licensing here:
http://trac.mach-ii.com/machii/wiki/FAQHowIsMachIILicensed
Personally I'm a fan of the BSD and LGPL license approaches,
We talked about LGPL, but I think it's flawed in a few aspects. I won't
get into the exact reasons, but the article from GNU on why you
shouldn't use it is a great starting point to explore:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html
We didn't go a straight GPL because of commercial usage in products and
the comprise was GPL with CE.
The BSD/MIT licenses are as free as it gets to a developer, and I
think they promote the best code quality in the grand scheme of
things, as the best code can be re-used anywhere in that or from that
ecosystem without nearly so much of the legal tippy-toeing that has
repeatedly burned me in trying to contribute to the CFML GPL
ecosystem
Well, I only know of two GPL centric open source projects in the CFML
world -- OpenBD and Mach-II.
We've had only one gripe about Mach-II switching from Apache to GPL V3
with classpath exception. Thanks in advance for letting me keep the
exact details brief as I describe what happened. This "complaint" was
from a company (unknown to us) that had taken our code base, modified
it, add their own extensions and sold it as a commercial product (again,
unknown to us). Suffice it to say we were a little shocked considering
their licensing question was the first time we had heard of this company
and no contributions had ever been given back to the framework.
I'll admit that companies behavior is a little discouraging, But the
appeal of many open licenses is exactly that, you can't be held
hostage by the developer and are allowed to do any damn thing you
please without an obligation to answer to them or contribute back to
them (And in this case if that company wants to keep using the old
version of Mach-II they can, so mission accomplished to some degree)
Really not much has changed. You don't have to answer to Team Mach-II
if you make an internal version of Mach-II. Nor are you obligated to
share it or contribute to the framework. The only difference is how you
can share or distribute the code. In the end GPL with CE allows you do
whatever you want, but sell it, modify it and sell it, or modify it and
release it under a different license.
Our last COCOMO analysis of Mach-II showed that 32 man years of effort
has been put into the project in the last 7 years. If you were to pay a
developer $75k/yr, that is about $2,400,000 USD of effort. I see your
point from the perspective of a developer *using* the project and
wanting to do something with it. On the other hand, the license is for
the people that spend their free time donating it to the project.
Nothing is less discouraging than contributing to a project to only see
your contributions used in a manner that is not in the spirit in which
the code was contributed. We want to keep the people that contribute to
the framework happy too!
My understanding of his post is that if someone's going to contribute
back to a project they'll do so because they want to, not because
someone is twisting their arm.
I think this is why we're a society of laws. At some point you can't
just take without giving something back. Things like "I want government
services like roads, etc. but I don't want to pay taxes." A license is
no different and I think it comes down to the spirit of the license.
Also, if somebody came to me asking if a library in Mach-II could be
dual licensed for some reason or another -- I'd consider it.
In the end, the link you posted is talking about the old rule of thumb
called the 90-9-1 principal. 90% of people do nothing but use the
project, 9% of people contribute something and 1% of people do about 90%
of the work. For Mach-II, it's closer to 97-2-1 in the terms of ratio.
I do think this is better than most CFML open source projects where the
ratio doesn't exist -- it 1 person doing everything.
Best,
.Peter
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