Slashdot Mirror
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.
Another alternative to Lutris Enhydra Java/XML Application Server is Orion Server. This application server was one of the first fully J2EE compliant application servers, even before WebLogic. It is 100% Java. It supports both EJB and JNDI. It is FREE for development. I follow their list group and they seem to have a very good following. I find the product to be very easy to configure and deploy. It is worth evaluating.
OK.
Seriously.
How hard can it be to expect that the SUBJECT LINES in a story get at least a second look to make sure that there are not typos in the FIRST TWO WORDS?
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...
OpenDivX vs. DivX4
Use the open source community to test & improve your stuff for you, and then close things down and make money with it.
Hey, it seems to be a succesfull formula! Any more examples of stuff like this happening?
I know of one: http://www.freechess.org
Take GPL code, improve it a little, and then sell it off (to the USCL in this case). Doesn't matter it's a GPL violation...the author can't prove anything anyway, unless he pays $$$ lawyers.
--
GCP
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.
InstantDB is strange in that it was often referred to as an open source product by many (including Lutris employees), but no one outside Lutris ever actually got to see the source.
"Open Source" isn't a trademarked expression, so people should watch out if someone is calling something "Open Source". There is a telltale sign: the source itself, and a licence attached to it, that gives anyone the right to do development of the source and distribute the source further under the same conditions. It should also ensure that this will continue to be so in the future. That license may be BSD or GPL or something similar, but it has to be there, together with the source. Unless that happened the thing is simply not open source.
This only serves as an example, that people should be more aware of the difference between marketing speech and what actually is reality. "Open Source" is a good 'brandmark' for marketing some products, even Microsoft tries to benefit from that with their "Shared Source". Now with Microsoft everyone understood the difference between marketing talk and what really happens. Why isn't the same scrunity applied to the rest of the business? If someone announces they will "soon" go Open Source the answer should be (more or less): "Fine, when?". When they fail to get their stuff together and fail to show some of the source (hey, we even have a term for that, it's vaporware) some scathing remarks and general awareness of foulplay should come up a little earlier than more than a year after the announced date, and a fait accompli, so the rest of the community knows them as the jokers they are and they get some negative publicity (after they cashed in on the Open Source "Trademark").
This is not meant to be critique about the article, it is asking, why the issue was raised so late and hoping the next time people will be more alert.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Please checkout GNU Classpath and GNU ClasspathX extensionsor the Gnu Compiler for Java if you are really interested in Free solutions for Java. Without those free foundations, Java programs will never be truely Free Software!
One quote from one of the emails:
- 2) Over the past year, several of us received explicit permission from Lutris to use InstantDB without payment. We have proceeded on that assurance. I don't believe Lutris can unilaterally and arbitrarily rescind that. Nor do I think Lutris can limit that approval to those to whom it was explicitly extended.
Uh, can we get a lawyer in here? If I'm not completely insane, it sounds like *any* venture that was operating under the understanding that InstantDB would be available free of charge could absolutely sue Lutris for the cost of migration? I imagine that this will not happen, just because the cost of migration will probably be a lot less than the cost of legal action. Isn't Lutris responsible for these sorts of assurances? Hell, is there a case for fraud?
I realize that the answer to all of these questions might be "no" but I don't see why.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
My understanding is that J2EE comes from Sun in basicall three parts: specification and other documentation in natural language; the Java API; and a sample implementation. I think these parts are fairly distinct. I want to know which of these is the "problem".
Obviously, every implementor must make use of the documentation. Normally, this does not taint an implementation, but Lutris claims that "reading the specification for J2EE forces the reader to agree to the SCSL". The J2EE specification license I can find doesn't say that. Though it is fairly restrictive, it doesn't seem to prohibit a free implementation. So is the specification a problem or not?
The JBoss response says that JBoss uses "seven jars" from Sun. I'm guessing these jars define the API, ie, they consist entirely of interfaces, abstract classes, and (maybe) trivial classes. Is this necessary? Most free implementations of proprietary API's include their own header files as free software. Does Sun claim a copyright on the API itself? What is the legal status of such claims, since there is basically only one way to express an API? Or did JBoss simply choose not to write their own versions?
Finally, does Enterprise Enhydra use essentially the same Sun classes as JBoss, or do they borrow some of the sample implementation as well? Do they claim that their commercial nature, or some pre-existing agreement with Sun, makes their situation different?
Thanks if you can untangle this.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
I've been using JBoss for over a year now. It's full featured, is very fast, has a small footprint, and is just generally a brilliant piece of work. Enhydra Enterprise was a long-term vaporware effort -- at least until recently. There were alphas and betas for over a year, but it just never seemed to become ready.
In addition, JBoss is elegant. It is modular and based on JMX. You can plug in new modules and your own code ridiculously easily. JBoss also requires no assembly/deployment phase for EJBs. It's just brilliant.
JBoss has a very active, dedicated bunch of J2EE gurus building it and answering questions in its forums and on mailing lists. The development activity on JBoss seems very high, and the users and developers are very accessible. Enhydra's forums always seemed stale and not very helpful. To me, it has always looked like all of the best people were working on JBoss while Enhydra was just sort of sitting there.
We use JBoss as our main J2EE development platform and deploy either on JBoss or one of the commercial J2EE servers. JBoss starts up fast, hot deploys web applications, EJBs, and connector resources with lightning speed. It comes with standard, easy integration to Tomcat. We're very happy with it.
I think JBoss just won. I also happen to think it would be a great addition to any standard Linux distribution... but that might be offtopic.
As noted in the original story, the old version (perhaps a link to http://enhydra.enhydra.org/ would have been more appropriate) is still free. This license perpetuates itself in the code:
So they let you know that this source must remain under this license, and that any derivatives must carry it, and that they can revise the license at any time (for future versions of the code). They even said that they could do that to you, but you went and spent time and effort on it anyway.
The only thing really keeping anyone from basically ignoring this license is the following paragraph:
As long as you keep code compartmentalized, you only have to keep *their* code (or any code which has been submitted to them) with this license agreement.
Anyway, what all this boils down to is that they gave all the rights you could ever ask for, but that includes their right to take it back. They could also revise the license in future versions to say "From this point on, all code is the exclusive property of Lutris, and will be closed for all of eternity, and used by us as we laugh and spit in your face." Because they reserve the right to revise the license at any time, this is what you asked for, and what you got. Oh sure, at the time they change it, you can fork the existing code under the old license, because they said you could continue to use the old one, but that doesn't change the fact that they can (and apparently will) railroad your code at a moment's notice. Your code is after all required to carry their license now that it's a part of their project, and submitted back to them.
So while closing it might be sleazy, it's completely legal, within their rights, and you all should have expected it. Corporations don't have souls, or morality. Sometimes its members do, but it's rare that the people with morals (or at least those willing to exercise them) are the people in power.
Put another, blunter way; If you grease yourself up and bend over, someone will f*ck you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I missed the part where anyone outside Lutris contributed to the code (after its acquisition). How could they contribue when the source was never released? Could you point me to this please?
So Enhydra may have other intellectual property problems.
I have a somewhat different take on this.
It was clear to me -- as an Enhydra developer and partner on my current project -- that Lutris was seriously committed to the open source movement. I can't support the idea now circulating that its open source commitment was a bait and switch manever to get free volunteer support from the community. They walked the walk as well as talking the talk. They were firmly committed to ESR's principles in tCatB. Their business model was to give away the software and make their money on services.
The only problem is, the tCatB principles don't work. They haven't worked for anyone. Services revenues don't scale in the nonlinear way that is required to support the extremely high costs of professional-quality software research and development. Everyone who's tried this on a larger scale than the "Dave's Software Shop" four-person consulting business has failed or is currently in the process of failing. Lutris was just one of many groups to be led down the garden path by this unworkable business model.
They started to realize this earlier this year and were thrown into great confusion. Open source isn't just a movement, it's a religion, and it's always painful when your religion turns out to be false. For a while they thrashed. Finally grim economic necessity forced them to what is here being called their "betrayal," which was, to abandon the tCatB business model, and to return to a business model that has historically been successful for many developers. This was a visibly painful transition and they were reluctant to make it, but it was that or go into bankruptcy. (I get the feeling that some zealots here think Lutris should have just marched joyously into martyrdom!)
Their problem was not that they abandoned open source. Their problem was that they believed in it in the first place, without setting up any rational business model, based on ESR's numbers-free hand-waving and on media buzz around the Linux bubble. Had they just worked from a conventional business model to start with, their product would have been just as good (and it is pretty darn good), even more people would have used it, and they would not have become the whipping boy for the remaining (but shrinking) core of religious believers.
The true betrayal was in people who didn't have any understanding of, or concern for, business realities selling Lutris's founders the open source bill of goods and encouraging them to go into business in a way that was foolish and self-destructive. The true betrayal was in proselytizing for a false religion.
Tim