Re: donation of project

[Matt Liotta <ml...@montarasoftware.com>]

Thanks for all the responses. At this point, I am reluctant to release 
the code under an Apache style license without a community behind it. I 
don't want to see our code go into some proprietary project and never 
benefit the community because the actual open release was handled 
incorrectly. Right now my thinking is that we will release the code 
under the GPL and put it up on Sourceforge. The GPL will protect the 
code from being used in proprietary projects for the short-term while 
allowing an open source community to develop. Should such a community 
develop, I am very interested in relicensing our work under the Apache 
license and donating it to the Apache Foundation.

Any thoughts on the above? Again, I am most interested in seeing this 
project under the Apache umbrella to ensure that the Java community 
benefits, so any thoughts on best how to accomplish that in regard to 
the above concern would be appreciated.

On a side note, I did contact the Eclipse project to see if they were 
interested, but our use of Swing pretty much ended those conversations. 
I am also trying to convince Sun that they should include the code in 
the JDK as they already have similar functionality albeit out of date.

Matt Liotta
Montara Software, Inc.
http://www.MontaraSoftware.com


On Dec 28, 2003, at 6:40 PM, Leo Simons wrote:

> Hi Matt,
>
> Matt Liotta wrote:
> > Nicola wrote:
>
>>> I am personally very interested in this, having worked on a similar 
>>> project. In any case, it's a very interesting thing for Java in 
>>> general to have such a component opensourced. Because of this, I 
>>> will see to do all I can to help you.
>>
> +1 (which means "me too" in this context :D)
>
>> Indeed, the proposal doesn't seem to be inline with the document in 
>> two ways. First, there is no active development community for it. 
>> Second, while the project was originally commercial in nature, we are 
>> no longer doing development on it as it currently suits our needs. 
>> That is not to say that we won't do bug fixes and other maintenance 
>> to it, but we just don't have any active development happening on it 
>> anymore.
>
> I suggest you create a zip file/tarball with all the source code,
> the apache license in it (and as the header for all the 
> sourcefiles)[1], and
> post this somewhere on your company website (don't need to publish
> the link). Next, we set up a sourceforge project, or better yet, just 
> use
> an existing project there where the code fits (like www.krysalis.org)
> and have Nicola put the code up there.
>
> We'll make a little noise around the OSS java community, see if this
> attracts some interest, if it has the potential of becoming a real 
> project.
> If so, we'll start incubation.
>
> Why not start incubation immediately? IMHO, we need to get a feel
> for the code and the people involved with the code first.
>
> cheers,
>
> - Leo Simons
>
> [1] - www.apache.org/LICENSE.txt
>


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Re: donation of project

[Leo Simons <le...@apache.org>]

Hi Matt,

(IANAL)

Matt Liotta wrote:

> Thanks for all the responses. At this point, I am reluctant to release 
> the code under an Apache style license without a community behind it. 
> I don't want to see our code go into some proprietary project and 
> never benefit the community because the actual open release was 
> handled incorrectly. Right now my thinking is that we will release the 
> code under the GPL and put it up on Sourceforge. The GPL will protect 
> the code from being used in proprietary projects for the short-term 
> while allowing an open source community to develop.

I appreciate your concerns, but I doubt the GPL is your answer. Besides
being incompatible (according to the FSF) with apache-style licenses (which
is a lot of the open source java code around), it isn't actually a 
guarantee a
community will be formed. Getting a community in place is not something
you can do by choice of license. Also consider that as long as modifications
are not redistributed at all, the license doesn't really get you anything.

That said, putting things in the open under GPL does allow interested peeps
to take a look and see what you got.

> Should such a community develop, I am very interested in relicensing 
> our work under the Apache license and donating it to the Apache 
> Foundation. 

There's a bit of a catch here. If a community develops, people will likely
submit patches, which will also be licensed under the GPL. Either you don't
incorporate those patches, or you get everyone to provide a license grant
(which can be quite difficult sometimes).

Also consider what happens if you donate the materials to apache right
away, and we create a new incubator project. That doesn't guarantee a
community being formed either. People can take the apache-licensed code
and use it commercially without contributing something back, just as could
happen with hosting materials at sourceforge.

Finally, consider what happens if someone submits a patch to your
GPL-ed code, and you incorporate the change back into one of your
commercial products. That *could* mean that *you* would then be in
violation, given that the GPL is pretty viral. You'd have to open source
your entire product. (to avoid the headache of ensuring this doesn't
happen, many companies that want some "GPL-style" virality choose
the LGPL instead).

> Any thoughts on the above? Again, I am most interested in seeing this 
> project under the Apache umbrella to ensure that the Java community 
> benefits, so any thoughts on best how to accomplish that in regard to 
> the above concern would be appreciated. 

These decisions are always quite difficult; there's no absolute 'right'
choice. Just keep in mind that having a project under the Apache
umbrella doesn't automatically "ensure that the java community
benefits". There simply are no certainties like that in open source.

hope this helps!

- LSD



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Re: donation of project

[Bertrand Delacretaz <bd...@codeconsult.ch>]

Le Jeudi, 1 jan 2004, à 17:57 Europe/Zurich, Matt Liotta a écrit :

> ...Right now my thinking is that we will release the code under the 
> GPL and put it up on Sourceforge....

Note that you can use an Apache-like license on SourceForge.

The chaperon and jfor projects, for example, are hosted there but use 
such licenses to allow them to be distributed with Apache Cocoon.

--
   Bertrand Delacretaz
   independent consultant, Lausanne, Switzerland
   http://cvs.apache.org/~bdelacretaz/


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Re: donation of project

[David Jencks <da...@coredevelopers.net>]

While I certainly appreciate your concerns about releasing under a 
bsd/apache style license without a community, please also consider the 
difficulties of relicensing.   If you change the license from [L]GPL to 
bsd/apache, you will need to get something like written agreement from 
every contributor who, for example, contributed a fix to a typo in the 
javadoc:-).  Realistically, I think the only way to do this is to make 
people agree to the relicensing before you accept any contributions 
from them.  Having done this once, without such a pre-agreement, this 
is a hassle I wouldn't want to undertake again.

I've only been following this out of the corner of my eye, but I 
thought at least two incubator PMC members expressed considerable 
interest in this project.  It seems to me that this might be taken as 
an indication that three independent committers might be easy to find 
even within apache and so this project might actually be a reasonable 
incubation candidate.

Hope this doesn't muddy the waters too much,
thanks
david jencks

On Thursday, January 1, 2004, at 08:57 AM, Matt Liotta wrote:

> Thanks for all the responses. At this point, I am reluctant to release 
> the code under an Apache style license without a community behind it. 
> I don't want to see our code go into some proprietary project and 
> never benefit the community because the actual open release was 
> handled incorrectly. Right now my thinking is that we will release the 
> code under the GPL and put it up on Sourceforge. The GPL will protect 
> the code from being used in proprietary projects for the short-term 
> while allowing an open source community to develop. Should such a 
> community develop, I am very interested in relicensing our work under 
> the Apache license and donating it to the Apache Foundation.
>
> Any thoughts on the above? Again, I am most interested in seeing this 
> project under the Apache umbrella to ensure that the Java community 
> benefits, so any thoughts on best how to accomplish that in regard to 
> the above concern would be appreciated.
>
> On a side note, I did contact the Eclipse project to see if they were 
> interested, but our use of Swing pretty much ended those 
> conversations. I am also trying to convince Sun that they should 
> include the code in the JDK as they already have similar functionality 
> albeit out of date.
>
> Matt Liotta
> Montara Software, Inc.
> http://www.MontaraSoftware.com
>
>
> On Dec 28, 2003, at 6:40 PM, Leo Simons wrote:
>
>> Hi Matt,
>>
>> Matt Liotta wrote:
>> > Nicola wrote:
>>
>>>> I am personally very interested in this, having worked on a similar 
>>>> project. In any case, it's a very interesting thing for Java in 
>>>> general to have such a component opensourced. Because of this, I 
>>>> will see to do all I can to help you.
>>>
>> +1 (which means "me too" in this context :D)
>>
>>> Indeed, the proposal doesn't seem to be inline with the document in 
>>> two ways. First, there is no active development community for it. 
>>> Second, while the project was originally commercial in nature, we 
>>> are no longer doing development on it as it currently suits our 
>>> needs. That is not to say that we won't do bug fixes and other 
>>> maintenance to it, but we just don't have any active development 
>>> happening on it anymore.
>>
>> I suggest you create a zip file/tarball with all the source code,
>> the apache license in it (and as the header for all the 
>> sourcefiles)[1], and
>> post this somewhere on your company website (don't need to publish
>> the link). Next, we set up a sourceforge project, or better yet, just 
>> use
>> an existing project there where the code fits (like www.krysalis.org)
>> and have Nicola put the code up there.
>>
>> We'll make a little noise around the OSS java community, see if this
>> attracts some interest, if it has the potential of becoming a real 
>> project.
>> If so, we'll start incubation.
>>
>> Why not start incubation immediately? IMHO, we need to get a feel
>> for the code and the people involved with the code first.
>>
>> cheers,
>>
>> - Leo Simons
>>
>> [1] - www.apache.org/LICENSE.txt
>>
>
>
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