Hi all, I have had a couple of discussions with a lot of folks in the past days. During them, an idea was born that I would now like to present to the broader audience here on the list:
We consider dual-licensing rsyslog, just like e.g. MySQL is dual licensed. Nothing is yet finalized and I honestly request feedback on that idea. Please let me explain... What would it mean? For open source users, nothing at all changes. Rsyslog would still be licensed under GPL. However, the proposal would give us the option to release certain parts under GPLv2 (remember rsyslog v3 and above are licensed under GPLv3). While we did not yet consider this option, it has been brought to our attention that libmysqlclient is licensed GPLv2 only and as such cannot be linked to a GPLv3 program (the ommysql plugin). I currently try to sort this out and have contacted MySQL, but unfortunately did not yet receive a reply. Should that become a real issue, we can either drop MySQL support or we can move the affected part to GPLv2. Thanks to the plugin architecture, the main executable is not affected, so it would be a matter of changing the license on the MySQL plugin (which is in all respects a separate project just combined in the main tarball for convenience - long term users know that it once was a separate project ... and very inconvenient to handle ;)). When it comes to commercial applications, there *is* a change. Dual-licensing would enable us to provide rsyslog technology under a commercial license and thus add to the funding of the project. The most important use case for this ability is probably Adiscon itself. Remember: Adiscon sponsors rsyslog development. Actually, the funding is currently almost exclusively provided by Adiscon's commercial software sales in the Windows environment. Rsyslog has much evolved and its object model is becoming more and more appealing in itself. I now have been granted permission to include Adiscon's proprietary BEEP stack (based on, but superior to liblogging) into rsyslog. This would free the formerly closed source and make it available to the open source community at large (under GPLv3). However, permission is granted only under the condition that code improvements (and there will be a lot) can be contributed back to Adiscon's commercial software. One way to do that would be, of course, to create a separate project for these sources and dual-license that from the beginning on. However, that sounds unnatural and overly complicated to me. I would like to concentrate on writing the greatest syslog technology on earth and not on circumventing license restrictions... Than I was told that a number of open source project successfully use dual licensing and this is probably the best route to take. What would it NOT mean? Dual licensing rsyslog is NOT intended as a step to build different editions of rsyslog, where some of them will become closed source and only be available for a fee. It is both my and Adiscon's firm believe that such a movement is plainly wrong and severely impacts an open source project. This will not happen to rsyslog. The intension of dual licensing it is to use (parts of) its technology in commercial context's, not to make rsyslog in itself a product. So, why bother? If nothing really changes for the user base, why am I writing this long mail? Well, first of all I would like to avoid everything that badly affects the rsyslog project. So I ask for feedback if you see any problems with this move. Secondly, and more importantly, code contributors *are* affected. This is another reason why I post on this list, where I reach almost all contributors. In order to dual license a work, one must be copyright holder of the whole work. Thankfully, I have written most parts of the technology that are interesting for dual licensing. However, there were a number of much appreciated contributions (once again a big thank you to all who contribute!). Even though there was no explicit license applied to any of the contributions, I think it is a fair to assume they were meant to be licensed under the same license rsyslog is. So we in fact have multiple copyright holders. In support for dual licensing, we would need to set up a policy that patch authors transfer their copyright to Adiscon and me. I believe that a contribution policy is well enough to do the trick. Specifically, I am a strong opponent of any copyright transfer documents that need to be signed before I can integrate a patch. Instead, I would setup a contribution policy page that states that copyright is automatically been transferred by sending in a patch. If I can't get away without it, I may send a link to this page after I received a patch, but that would all that happened. And, of course, we need to have permission from past contributors to use their patches under this model - so if you have contributed and don't like the policy, please reply so that I know it. Feedback, please... I honestly think that the ability to dual-license rsyslog brings benefit to the long-term goals of rsyslog. Seeing other (big) open source projects like MySQL using such a policy and succeeding in the community makes me feel good about it. But, again, I would not like to cause any troubles to the rsyslog project. So please reply if you don't like the thoughts outlined here or if you have any concerns. Nothing is fixed yet, but I'd like to get over it as soon as possible... Please reply by private mail if you'd like not to express yourself on the list. Thanks a lot, Rainer _______________________________________________ rsyslog mailing list http://lists.adiscon.net/mailman/listinfo/rsyslog
