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Lutris, Close Source, And The Open Source Community

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the like-a-jilted-wife dept.

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.

1 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. no reason to get upset by mj6798 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.