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Posted to dev@lenya.apache.org by Lon Boonen <lo...@wanadoo.nl> on 2003/09/19 02:37:35 UTC
A source of Inspiration and Change Was: Lenya violating Xopus OS License
I have to say my thing. Please read on, it's a long read, but I hope an
interesting one as well.
Michael has been and still is an inspiration to me. And many others I'm
sure. His sincerity and honesty is beyond anyone's doubt.
He convinced us to go open source and we're still glad we did. We've learned
a lot and from discussions like today are still learning a lot.
The two OSCOM meetings I attended have been the six most inspirational days
in my career. I have Michael to thank for that.
Should I say it one more time? Oh well, it can't hurt.
I never believed in any malicious intention of whomever person or party in
this licensing thing. In the least place from Michael.
Mistakes have been made. So what. No one is blaming anyone and no serious
harm has been done.
I find it interesting to see how the OS model is handling stuff like this.
Who is 'responsible' for the legal stuff, is it a person, is it a company?
Neither one. Who is to be contacted? Where does it say that?
Who is reading licenses, anyway. Everyone should, but almost no one does. Do
things like this happen more often? Am I the bad guy for pointing this out?
Is my website going to be DDOS'd now?
Everyone knows we turned 'commercial' again. We're developing a 'commercial'
(there's that ugly word again) version of Xopus.
In doing so we've tried to be very careful as to the usage of contributions
made to the OS version. We contacted all relevant contributors to inform
them about our move and made them an offer (that I still have to fulfil,
remind me).
I just want to tell you we are very careful in what we do. I would hate if
we would do injustice to anyone's work.
In our case things are very clear though: code we develop is ours. In the OS
case it is much more complex.
If one of our employees was to develop some code and contribute it to some
OS project that might be a problem under dutch law. Since this employee is
working for a company the company owns all copyrights to all relevant work
he or she produces. In other terms: it is not the employee to give code
away. Not even if that code was developed in off hours. But who is to check
this? Is the OS world checking whether or not contributions are legit?
Interesting stuff I think.
As Stefano pointed out the OS process is young and evolving quickly. Some
bumps have to be evoluted out, others in. The process is fascinating.
Along the way errors are being made. Making errors is almost a necessity in
evolution. It's a lousy evolution that makes no errors! You can print that
on a tile and hang it on the wall.
I hope we will all learn from- and get inspired by the 'errors' having been
disclosed and made (self-reference) today.
To get back to Michael. Open Source is an evoluting process and Michael is a
strong katalyst for that process. He speeds up things and encourages parties
to take part in the process. A katalyst shouldn't be consumed by the process
though. He may participate, but in the end he should still be there to
inspire a new process.
So Michael, please don't take what happened personal or make yourself in any
way reponsible for it. You're doing what you are best at and that is
bringing people and ideas together.
Having said that I hope I can finally get some sleep.
greetings Lon
> No Michael, don't say this. Nobody is pointing fingers, not even Lon.
>
> Shit happens. We all know this.
>
> You have tried in the past to convince several players that going the
> open source way is cool and good for their business... well, it's hard
> and you now realize, I think, that open source works the other way
> around: you do stuff, and people come to you when they are interested.
>
> Sure, this leaves you with the problem that nobody might show up and
> you might running out of steam before that happens (see the miriad of
> sourceforge projects that went thru that), but, hey, that's what
> software darwinism is.
>
> nobody ever said that evolution was a pretty thing to watch or to
> participate in.
>
> --
> Stefano.
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Re: A source of Inspiration and Change Was: Lenya violating Xopus
OS License
Posted by Steven Noels <st...@outerthought.org>.
Andrew Savory wrote:
> Lon, thanks for taking the time to write this. It was a long read, but
> well worth it - it's very interesting to get the view from your side of
> the fence. If you can make it to the GetTogether, I'd love to talk more
> with you about the frictions between commercial companies, intellectual
> property and open source development!
... and please rest assured that such friction most often exists in the
eye of the beholder, should he choose to perceive such friction, or
hasn't spend a careful amount of thinking a company should cope with the
border of business & open source.
<pmc chair hat off>
Almost all of the code of xReporter has been funded by several customers
of Outerthought, and ALL of that code is open. People get good support
for free, and when we have time, we add new features. Of course, we
don't have external contributors (yet, but we're slowly working on
that), and we still 'own' the project in a legal sense. We believe it
wouldn't be in anyone's interest to donate xReporter to a larger
organisation _right now_: it would be largely premature. IMVHO, I think
Wyona has been tricked into a premature donation (not in terms of
codebase, but in terms of how the company and the community had sorted
out how to cope with open source). IMVHO!
All-in-all, I'm yet to encounter the first friction between OT as a
business, and xReporter as an Open Source project. There's many, many
parameters which have to be accounted for when deciding to open-source a
project, let alone donate it to the ASF, especially if you are a
commercial entity (which Wyona & BitFlux & Q42 are). I don't claim to be
an expert, but from the experience we have with xReporter, it also is a
matter of project maturity, technology maturity, openness because of
design and componentization, genericity of the addressed use case, and
"speed cohesion".
Quite often, there's two levels of progress going on in a "hibrid open
source project" (i.e. with one party having a strong commercial
interest): what the (paying) customer wants, and what the community is
able to 'swallow'. If the customer pushes hard with his own private
requirements (and is willing to pay for it), the company will hack &
produce code at great speed, committing large lumps of code into the
public repository, without public discussion of design, and a community
which is force-fed with code it hasn't asked for. So the community will
get 'fed up'. If the community is in the driver's seat, the company
might become nervous since the community might go where the company (or
its customers) had not planned for.
Personally, reading the mail from Roger Stupf, I would be forced to
_seriously_ rethink Lenya's license, donation, and the business relation
with Wyona, and all that. It is a _very_ bad sign that such things are
allowed to happen.
I don't intend to belittle Michael's best intentions in all this, but it
saddens me to see his intentions to be misinterpreted by (my
perception!) a lack of maturity of the involved parties & projects, more
specifically about the balancing act between business & open source, and
business in general. (ducking away) But maybe that ain't too bad, since
it's all about life-time learning anyhow.
I'm not going to say it is simple, but I don't believe that friction is
something one cannot avoid. It's just a matter of going where you want
to go, when you want to go, and proceeding at a speed you, your
customers, the community, and the codebase are able to cope with.
Unfortunately, since Open Source can be considered 'kewl' by some
members in this equation, sometimes one proceeds at a higher speed the
engine has been designed for.
</pmc>
HTH, and somehow contributes to this discussion. I know I might have
tripped on people's toes, but I wouldn't write it down if I didn't care
about all this. And that includes your toes as well. ;-)
</Steven>
--
Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/
Outerthought - Open Source Java & XML An Orixo Member
Read my weblog at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/
stevenn at outerthought.org stevenn at apache.org
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Re: A source of Inspiration and Change Was: Lenya violating Xopus
OS License
Posted by Andrew Savory <an...@luminas.co.uk>.
Hi,
On Fri, 19 Sep 2003, Lon Boonen wrote:
> I have to say my thing. Please read on, it's a long read, but I hope an
> interesting one as well.
Lon, thanks for taking the time to write this. It was a long read, but
well worth it - it's very interesting to get the view from your side of
the fence. If you can make it to the GetTogether, I'd love to talk more
with you about the frictions between commercial companies, intellectual
property and open source development!
Cheers,
Andrew.
--
Andrew Savory Email: andrew@luminas.co.uk
Managing Director Tel: +44 (0)870 741 6658
Luminas Internet Applications Fax: +44 (0)700 598 1135
Orixo alliance: http://www.orixo.com/ Web: www.luminas.co.uk
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Re: A source of Inspiration and Change Was: Lenya violating Xopus OS License
Posted by Stefano Mazzocchi <st...@apache.org>.
On Friday, Sep 19, 2003, at 02:37 Europe/Rome, Lon Boonen wrote:
> I find it interesting to see how the OS model is handling stuff like
> this.
You are making the same mistake again (you did already in a private
conversation we had a while ago) comparing the ASF with the open source
movement in general.
I cannot (nor would not if I could) speak for the entire open source
movement, but I do want to defent the position of the ASF, which has
been inspirational for other 'software foundations' (python's,
mozilla's) that were created afterwards.
> Who is 'responsible' for the legal stuff, is it a person, is it a
> company?
The Apache Software Foundation is the legal 'owner' of the code that
resides in the foundation CVS. The ASF has a strict policy that forces
all code *developped* by the foundation to be licensed with the ASF
Software License. And all code *distributed* by the foundation to be
licensed with a license *compatible* with the ASF Software License and
all software must be *compliant* to the needs of that license.
If not, the ASF board has the power to shut down the project or stop
further public access until the legal issues are resolved.
> Neither one.
This is a false and insulting statement for people that spent several
years of their lifes trying to design and run a valid legal system that
would protect the open source ventures and yet be safe and respectful
from a legal standpoint.
> Who is to be contacted? Where does it say that?
Do you know the mail address of the person responsible for the legal
issues at Microsoft? Sun? IBM? Oracle? do you seriously expect that
commercial entities have a big "write email to me if you have legal
issues" when a single lawyer would cost 500$/hour and would, very
likely, spend an hour just to read a single email?
Besides, who is to be contacted at Q42 for a legal problem? where does
it say that?
Let's keep real: if you have a problem, you'll find your way thru, just
like you did here.
> Who is reading licenses, anyway.
The ASF has a "licensing committee" (licensing@apache.org, the list is
private to ASF members only and to invited legal experts), formed by
ASF members and list several "invited experts" which are
professionists in the law field (one works for IBM, another for Apple,
another is a law professor).
I've personally spent a lot of energy in discussions about licenses,
compatibility, philosophical questions, english legal terminology
debugging... the ASF Software License 2.0 has been in the making for 3
years, mostly due to patent and contribution issues. It's not public
because reaching consensus is damn hard, even inside the ASF itself.
> Everyone should, but almost no one does.
Just read the "CREDITS.txt" page that cocoon ships:
http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/cocoon-2.1/
CREDITS.txt?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
then, look at the /legal section of cocoon.
http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/cocoon-2.1/legal/
where you find no less than "48" different licences.
We made a serious effort to comply to all of them.
> Do things like this happen more often?
These things happen. Normally, they happen when a project is starting
to get a feeling of the huge differences between writing software
inhouse and writing software in the open, like in this case.
> Am I the bad guy for pointing this out?
absolutely not. I have thanked you already for this.
> Is my website going to be DDOS'd now?
Silly ranting will just make your point weaker.
> Everyone knows we turned 'commercial' again.
There is nothing *bad* in a commercial venture. Not even in a
commercial venture that decides to close up their
previously-open-sourced software because they feel like it.
Some "free software" advocates would consider you negatively, but not
the ASF nor the people that share those principles.
Open Source doesn't make sense all the time. It's a software
development metodology, not a religion or a political vision (like it
is for the FSF).
Failing to understand the difference would just piss off many people
around the ASF. [for sure, it pisses *me* off]
> We're developing a 'commercial'
> (there's that ugly word again) version of Xopus.
> In doing so we've tried to be very careful as to the usage of
> contributions
> made to the OS version. We contacted all relevant contributors to
> inform
> them about our move and made them an offer (that I still have to
> fulfil,
> remind me).
>
> I just want to tell you we are very careful in what we do. I would
> hate if
> we would do injustice to anyone's work.
> In our case things are very clear though: code we develop is ours. In
> the OS
> case it is much more complex.
yes, it is.
> If one of our employees was to develop some code and contribute it to
> some
> OS project that might be a problem under dutch law. Since this
> employee is
> working for a company the company owns all copyrights to all relevant
> work
> he or she produces.
This is the same in almost all countries in the world.
> In other terms: it is not the employee to give code
> away. Not even if that code was developed in off hours.
This is questionable. It is true only if the employee has been using
resources that belong to the company (hardware, software, bandwidth)
and if the company faces a loss or unfair competition by such a
production.
Not so black/white in all other cases. Besides, a company would damage
its PR pretty badly if they tried to enforce the above for small
patches to open source projects.
> But who is to check this?
Every committer of the ASF has to sign a contribution agreement before
being granted CVS access.
This covers the great majority of the contributed code.
For the code that is given in forms of patches thru Bugzilla, there is
no legal process defined: it is assumed that any patch contains code
that the patcher owns and that he/she gives
perpetual/irrevocable/blah-blah ownership to the foundation.
Admittedly, this is a hole in the legal process.
The ASF Software License 2.0 will clear this by including a section on
software contributions back to the project.
> Is the OS world checking whether or not contributions are legit?
Ask the ASF secretary (the one that has to receive all those signed
contribution agreements) and feel his pain (there are currently more
than 700 committters in the ASF)
> Interesting stuff I think.
For sure. If the above was nice and easy, we wouldn't need a foundation
in the first place.
> As Stefano pointed out the OS process is young and evolving quickly.
> Some
> bumps have to be evoluted out, others in. The process is fascinating.
> Along the way errors are being made. Making errors is almost a
> necessity in
> evolution. It's a lousy evolution that makes no errors! You can print
> that
> on a tile and hang it on the wall.
I agree. Also note that the bigger an organization becomes, the bigger
its inertia. The fact that many things aren't visible from the outside
of the foundation (on purpose or accidentally) doesn't mean they are
not present and they don't consume human resources (time, energy,
stress and emotions).
> I hope we will all learn from- and get inspired by the 'errors' having
> been
> disclosed and made (self-reference) today.
>
> To get back to Michael. Open Source is an evoluting process and
> Michael is a
> strong katalyst for that process. He speeds up things and encourages
> parties
> to take part in the process. A katalyst shouldn't be consumed by the
> process
> though. He may participate, but in the end he should still be there to
> inspire a new process.
>
> So Michael, please don't take what happened personal or make yourself
> in any
> way reponsible for it. You're doing what you are best at and that is
> bringing people and ideas together.
I definately agree with this.
--
Stefano.
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