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Sure we have compilers, but is the future outside the freshly paved road likely or even able to be outflanked by a better idea? When does this gang or that gang get to define that road? We have a benevolant dictator http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resourc... - is this landscape free from beneficial disturbance?

I made no such quoting error--that was direct from the New BSD text on the Wikipedia page--and I can't make any sense of whatever it is you're claiming. The 3rd clause of the New BSD license is "Neither the name of the nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission". That puts no restrictions on the code, only on the identity of the contributor. It just says that if I contribute code, the project can't use my name and write "Greg says our project is awesome" simply because I contributed--not without my written permission. That's what endorsement/promotion means here. The BSD licenses have always had "endorse or promote" restriction text of this form in them, because the University of California @ Berkeley didn't want people to think a BSD license says they approve of a program.

If you're reading any sort of profit or sale restriction out of that clause, you're very confused about what these licenses mean. I'd recommend Why you should use a BSD style license as a good piece comparing these licenses. Modified BSD License is more terse description of the same area, with a particularly easy to follow description of New BSD->GPL moves work.

MariaDB picked New BSD as the alternate license because it's "GPL compatible". That means they can just slurp up any contributions under those terms without worrying about the copyright trail on that code at all. All they have to do is include the New BSD license in their source and binary distributions for those parts, not mention their contributors by name so they're not seen as endorsing that commercial version, and they're done. New BSD code gets assimilated trivially, GPL code comes in with copyright assignment, and therefore at all times MariaDB is uniquely able to sell derived products or the company itself with full ownership of any new code added--again.

It really depends on who owns the license. If it is GPL'd by the contributor then it's within their rights to restrict usage. If on the other hand they signed ownership over to another copyright holder then it's not something one can fight really. They should have kept ownership and in turn their absolute control over the source. I might be wrong, IANAL. All I know is it depends on the owner, defined in the license. Assignment of ownership is, rightly, up to the owner.

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/iprguide.xml

Owning the copyright in a piece of work, whether literary or programmatic, means that you decide who can copy it, adapt it and distribute it. By default, only the owner can do these things.

All I know is this - make sure you're okay with assigning ownership to another if you contribute to any project you don't own, including an FSF one. Otherwise insist on your own copyright in the source. I can't think of any other way. That's why the GPL in the source code I've released has my name on it and not the Free Software Foundation's. But again IANAL, so go fly a kite ;-).

You could have just said 'dual licensing is a valid option' without suggesting people who don't like dual licensing lack business experience. I would suggest this OSS Watch article for a more balanced explanation of dual licensing, both the pros and the cons.

Repeat this sentence three times: "Bundling is not binding." There, feel better?

The GNU General Public License v2 - An Overview (subsection on bundling and aggregation).

You can also read the GPL, v2 and the GPL, v3 for more information rather than spreading disinformation.

Release early, release often if you want other people to get involved, if you just write everything yourself and release it afterwards i don't think many people would really care unless it is a really interesting project. The website you are going to host your source code doesnt really matter (that is atleast what i think, i can't think of any good reasons why one site would attract more developers then the other), so you might aswell put it on sourceforge or freshmeat. After using some search engines i found this site which might be of interest for you aswell. In short, try to get people involved early.

"In August 2005 Mambo, one of open source's poster child content management systems (CMS), was involved in a bitter duel with its core developers, who forked the project to give birth to Joomla. Could the developers survive without the management? Could Mambo do without its developers?"

RTFGPL Myths.

Your contributor faq doesn't indicate commit access, only that patches must be submitted via email. Not quite "true open source".

Just like that big phony "the linux kernel"!

The fact is that not having direct committer access is (a) about to be fixed, and (b) an infrastructure detail that doesn't detract from the fact that we have healthy participation from the community -- our new 3.3 release contains many community-contributed bug fixes and new features.

Also, we in fact have direct committers on the project now, working in svn branches. The docs on the web are out of date.


I am not trying to imply that Flex is more "open" than Laszlo, rather that Laszlo isn't "true open source".

*boggle*

OpenLaszlo is released under an OSI-approved license (CPL). "OSI approved" means "meets the OSI's definition of open source".


Why didn't you respond to my comment about ownership? In my mind, with "true open source" I still own the code I contribute.

Well, in your mind you can define "true open source" however you want. But in actuality, open source does not ncessarily mean the contributor owns the code. Many, many projects require that contributors assign copyright to the project, because otherwise the licensing issues quickly become unmanagable. (here's a good article.) Here's a short list of other projects that have similar requirements: the FSF (you may have heard of them), Gentoo, Novell (SuSE), Zimbra. There are lots more.

OpenLaszlo contributors assign copyright to the project, but in turn they license back their code. The license is very broad and allows the contributor to pretty much do whatever he/she wants with their code.

This "well you're not open source enough!" is a silly red herring anyway. My beef is not with your posting opinions about OpenLaszlo. Everyone has an opinion and you're entitled to post yours. But astroturfing without disclosing your motivations (in this case, who signs your paycheck and which projects you contribute to) is anti-community and just uncool. You've acknowledged your allegiences, move on.

Talking to Niall Sclater, Virtual Learning Environment Programme Director at The Open University on what they're having to do to Moodle to bring it up to scratch for their large community of blind users was very interesting. The OU have 100,000 students, 10,000 of them with a registered disability, basically they're have to completely redo the accessibility of Moodle.

There was, however, no suggestion that any of the alternatives, commerical or open source were any better.

cheers, thingie

If you're interested in hearing Niall speak on such issues, or have a pointed question to ask him, why not register for our up-coming Open Source and Sustainability 2006 conference