Hi Michael and all, thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. At first, please let me re-iterate that I honestly seek such feedback and nobody (at least over here) has made up his mind ;)
So... > > Feedback, please... > > Tbh, I have mixed feelings about that. > First of all, I have to say, that I'm not a lawyer, do don't take my > words for granted. > But as the original source code is licensed under the GPL (at least > parts of it like klogd and pidfile.c), and is copyright of the > original authors, you can't just relicense it. > You'd have to ask the original authors for permission. I missed to explain this: of course, the original source can not be relicensed. What I am most concerned about is new code and especially code that I intend to pull from Adiscon's closed source projects. Things like the queue w/ worker pool and the upcoming RFC 3195 part. > Second, I don't think that simply providing a wiki page, stating that > for all contributions the copyright is automatically transferred to > adiscon is legally effective. You definitely have to ask a lawyer for > clarification here. > For dual-licensed projects I know, like e.g. Qt, I know that they > don't/can't accept contributions (afaik even simple bug fixes) without > such a waiver. That's a major pain. I fully agree. I'll try to get a clarification. If we need a written waiver, that's a no-go. > As a result (at least from my experience), many people avoid to > contribute to such dual-licensed projects. > If you take Qt or MySQL again, you'll see that they are almost 100% > developed by the company itself. The flow of external contributions is > very little. > If you remember the latest discussion on the debian-devel mailing > list, you will remember that the current license of rsyslog was > mentioned as a definite advantage over syslog-ng. Yes, and that's one of the reasons I would like to discuss it *in depth* before any move is made :) > Imho the acceptance and the participation in the community will be > higher if rsyslog stayed a gpl only project. Again, this is only my > personal opinion and I very much understand your urge to generate > revenue for your company. > > An idea, which I would prefer over dual-licensing the complete rsyslog > project, is to provide enterprise level plugins under a commercial or > dual-license only and generate revenue from those plugins. > Evolution (mail and pim application) is such an example, where the > project itself is GPL, but the exchange connector (realised via > plugins) is commercial. This idea is interesting. Thank to the design, we are quite modular. And will become even more modular. Actually, *every* object will soon be (automatically, relax ;)) be loadable. When I am done with basic expressions, I'll take a deep look at this as part of loadable function support. I already have a lot of pieces on my mind, just need to pull them together. So I could take e.g. the RFC 3195 code and offer *just it* dual-licensed. Then, we need the painful waiver only for these parts. Doable. But I have to admit I don't like it. I agree it is probably the best approach to circumvent problems. But on first look it stinks ;) If dual-licensing causes grief to the project, it doesn't feel right to let it cause grief to some parts of the project. And the sample is a well-chosen one: the BEEP (3195) support will probably become *the* cornerstone in rsyslog protocol support (that's the reason I go for it). So does it sound good to make it a second-class citizen? Mmmmhhh... Of course, I also need to discuss internally. But I'd prefer to keep rsyslog components under a single license - even if that means we need to put everything under GPLv3 only. Or am I going overboard here? Please comment. > > HTH Indeed, it does. :) Rainer _______________________________________________ rsyslog mailing list http://lists.adiscon.net/mailman/listinfo/rsyslog
