Lutris, Close Source, And The Open Source Community

sohp writes "Back in mid-September Slashdot ran the story "Lutris Closes Enhydra Source" regarding that company's decision to retract its open source licensing terms. Now George C. Hawkins has reconstructed the pre-closed source reality and discusses it at How Lutris betrayed the Open Source Community . Short summary: blaming Sun was a smokescreen. Interesting use of web archive sites, too." There's definitely a lot of strong feelings against Lutris in the linked piece, but there's also a lot of validity as well.

Comments

Another IANAL but :)

[augustz]

But I'd say in all honesty that folks can distribute InstantDB free of charge. If someone tells you something in a form that can be verified somehow, and you base decisions on that in good faith, then there it's not as easy for the company to balk out as it might like to think.

That said, a concerted effort should be made to unsupport InstantDB. Contacting their customers directly can be usefull. I've already started with those that I could identify in a few seconds, and will be making the rounds when I get more info.

These are companies doing business with lutris and folks may want to be cautious doing business with them if they are working with what appears to be a con artist:

room33
indiqu
gravityrock.com
paremus
rarefire technologies
i-engineering.com
inet6/inetsys
mobiltee
eApps
eSavio

Lutris is also laying off employee's, sending the following email:

I am disappointed to inform you that you will be in the group of 35 employees being laid off
tomorrow. Sometime in the next half hour, a company executive will bring you a packet of
information for you to read this evening. Once you have received this packet, please take
the remainder of the day off. You must leave your computer here in your cubicle at Lutris.
--

Great to see someone pull together some pretty weasily threads, in the real world these folks would be scum. If someone could list the names of the folks on these threads that were in the weasel dept I'd appreciate that for future reference, you never know where they will turn up again, these scum have a nasty tendency to jump the ships they sink.

Please rember that the above is a rather uninformed opinion based on the information I read on the net, Do your own DD before basing decisions on it of course...

no reason to get upset

[mj6798]

If the open source development was carried out under a reasonable open source license, like BSD, GPL, or LGPL, it doesn't matter if the company wants to take further development private: the open source version continues to be open source, and any enhancements made to the open source version, through feedback or contributions, will continue to be open source.

Furthermore, nobody can make source "closed source" if they don't own it. So, if the open source community made valuable contributions and those became a key part of this software, the company can't make it closed source. The fact that they can suggests to me that few such contributions have come in.

Friends can betray you. But in business, and open source is part of the business world, what matters is contracts and licenses. If business partners violate contracts, you take them to court. Otherwise, if you don't like the license under which a piece of open source software is delivered or accepts contributions, don't use it and don't contribute to it. And if there is a possibility that some open source software with an otherwise OK license goes "closed source", you should keep frequent public mirrors of the open source versions so that open source development can continue when the need arises.

There are plenty of pieces of software that are semi-open where I have said "no thanks" (I won't name names, but I have complained about them enough on /.). I suggest others pay a little more attention to licenses as well before investing their time and effort in using or enhancing other people's software.