I've been pondering open source licensing for a while. I use a lot of open source software at my little company, but we typically avoid the licensing issue by only charging for services like custom development, hosting, and setup.
But what if I ever wanted to go beyond that? What if I wanted to support an open source project by contributing code and possibly donations, but I wanted to sell my derivitave work without giving away all my "trade secrets" via the GPL?
It seems other people are pondering this. In my recent "gpl business" searching on Google, I cam across this article: Open Source Licensing: Rosen Claims GPL Would Never Stand Up in Court @ LBN. It seems I'm not the only one pondering this.
Other things that have brought these thoughts to a head are dotProject's move from the BSD (a very business friendly license) in 1.0.2 to the GPL as of 2.0. And just before that, I found that the Etomite CMS has been dropped by the core developer because of the GPL (and a thousand different misunderstandings thereof).
In the article I mentioned earlier, the Open Source Initiative (rather Rosen, the former general counsel of it) has questioned the viability of the GPL to stand up in court.
What it all comes down to is that there needs to be a license that is friendly both to hobbiest developers and business developers. The LGPL, the GPL's little brother, handles this pretty well by making it focused on just the library or component. In the end the LGPL takes away the mercenary nature of the GPL by not making the whole project be forced to use its license. The library itself will be rulled by GPL rules, but not the whole project.
In my mind that promotes colaboration on underlying components (typically the hard part) and leaves actual creation of products to companies who can sell their product, and hobbiests who just want a free alternative.
The GPL seems to make everyone give up their code, which in my mind completely negates the purpose of putting a little (c) on anything you create.
Just thoughts.
Posted by TheIdeaMan at April 22, 2005 09:54 AM | TrackBack