On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 2:59 AM, Alan Williamson <[email protected]> wrote:
> Approach us ... let us know what you want to use and we can look to grant a
> specific license for your project.   Railo are using OpenBD code in their
> build and we have adjusted individual component licenses accordingly.

+1 what Alan said. Railo is very pleased with the arrangement (around
C++ CFX support, in case anyone wasn't aware) and it's a great example
of collaboration between the engines - and I suspect we'll see a lot
more of that in the years ahead!

If the OpenBD parser fits CFE and the license is the only obstacle,
talk about re-licensing the parser...

I sympathize with your view point because when I've been working at
commercial organizations, use of GPL is extremely problematic. Even
LGPL can be problematic in some situations. Model-Glue was LGPL but
because of its code-generation architecture, that introduced some
legal concerns (over intermixing LGPL code fragments with proprietary
code) - as far as Adobe's legal team were concerned - and so
Model-Glue shifted to the Apache so that Adobe could continue using it
without legal problems. Your opinion of that will depend on how "pure"
your view of open / free software is, I suspect. I admire the thought
processes that created the GPL but my pragmatism favors the Apache
license - given that you can't incorporate GPL code into non-GPL open
source code and distribute it :(

GPL is the strongest promoter of open source software and I am happy
to contribute to GPL projects (I have - dating back over a decade) but
when I am creating new OSS, I prefer a weaker license that places
fewer constraints on consumers of that code (be they saintly users or
evil corporations trying to make a buck off my innovations :) I'd
rather my code be widely used, under any conditions, than worry about
whether any or all changes made by third parties come back to me as
patches. And if some evil corporation makes a for-profit product out
of my code, then either my OSS version will survive or it won't, on
its own merits. After all, if we believed that OSS couldn't compete
with commercial products, there simply wouldn't be any OSS (or, at
least, there wouldn't be any _successful_ OSS) - and we know that's
not the case.

An interesting corollary to all this:
* The JMS event gateway is shipped in "open source" form with ACF. I
wrote that code while I was employed by Adobe (Macromedia) as part of
the Web Team (not the CF team). The Adobe (Macromedia) open source
license states you can't use that code in anything that runs on
something other than ColdFusion (really! read the license!).
* The ActiveMQ event gateway was also written by me. I wrote it
commercially for a client in San Francisco. That client decided to
donate it Adobe. It ships as "open source" under the same license as
the JMS event gateway.

I doubt the Adobe license would get OSI approval as Open Source but it
is open source (small letters). There are varying degrees of "open" :)
-- 
Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN
Railo Technologies, Inc. -- http://getrailo.com/
An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/

"If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive."
-- Margaret Atwood

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