Since this turned into a discussion about opentaps, I'd like to explain
the opentaps licensing and business model a little better, for the
benefit of everybody in the OFBIZ community.
The opentaps licensing model is a way we thought of to increase the
total body of openly available software, hopefully to the benefit of
everybody. Our goal is not to exclude anybody, whether you are a user,
a service provider, or a vertical market ISV, from using our software.
Rather, it is to create a fair mechanism for encouraging contributions
back to the open source community and supporting open source
development. (It is actually a more sophisticated form of some early
cost-sharing models we tried two years ago but simply didn't work.)
If you are thinking of creating a commercial product which falls out of
the scope of our open source license, we have a couple of options:
(a) We offer a commercial license which is a small fraction of the cost
for you to create these applications yourself or hiring a consultant to
do it for you. With this license, you do not have any obligations to
publish your proprietary code. All our commercial licensing revenues,
in turn, help support ongoing development and support for open source
software, to the benefit of everybody.
(b) Alternatively, you could contribute features back to us in exchange
for commercial licenses, and we offer very generous terms of exchange
which will give you a good return on your investment in those features
and save you from "reinventing the wheel" first. In effect, you'll be
joining us in the development of opentaps.
Of course, please do not mistake any of this for trying to dissuade
anybody from contributing back to OFBIZ. I've spent three plus years
trying to get more contributions to OFBIZ, and, obviously, the better
OFBIZ is, the better off we are. However, if you want to use opentaps
but don't want to create an open source product based on it yourself, I
do not want you to feel that we are trying to exclude you either.
Si Chen
Scott A wrote:
Here is a question. If I decide to modify my business model and go for a
franchise type business where I sell the entire package which includes
website, admin (ofbiz) and product to a company from what I understand I can
do so freely with the Apache's License but I could not do it with a HPL. Is
this a correct assumption?
Christian Geisert wrote:
Florin Jurcovici schrieb:
Hello.
To see if I really got it wrong, I did a bit of research on the various
licenses. I think it is useful to restate briefly what I understand from
each license. (I surely would like to see a lawyer comment on these
licensing issues.)
[..]
Apache license: as far as I can understand it, it allows you to
commercially license only stuff which is only coupled on interfaces
exposed by an app, such as plugins, but not stuff which replaces parts
of an app and/or implements various things differently, and which uses
code in the app to build and run - like for instance licensing ofbiz
with a module which not only provides additional financial services but
also changes whatever there already is in ofbiz.
I don't know where you got this information from but it is clearly
wrong, see
http://www.apache.org/foundation/licence-FAQ.html#WhatDoesItMEAN
for details.
Short: You are allowed to distribute/sell your software which is based
on code licensed under the Apache License and you are not required to
publish your modified code. All you need to do is to include the license
and give an attribution notice.
Big difference to the GPL (whatever version)
--
Christian
