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Open Source, Closed Documentation?
sunset asks: "Recently I was motivated to look at WebGUI which looks like a pretty cool open source project. However I was having trouble making it work with Red Hat 8.0 which includes Apache 2.0. This seems like a reasonable thing to want, as Red Hat 8 has been out since September and Apache 2 has been publicly released for close to a year. Checking the WebGUI community discussion forum, I found that
someone else had already inquired about this. Following the rest of the thread, you learn that the product's vendor considers this information to be proprietary, and that you must pay $50 to join their Support Forum to get the information. It gets better. The associated Membership Agreement for the Support Forum includes the clause 'You shall not to share [sic] the information contained herein with any other party.' So if I join up, I am locked out of sharing valuable information with the open source community about how to install this open source product. In the end I found out what I needed to know without giving up my rights or my hard-earned bucks, but frankly this attitude from the vendor pisses me off. Am I alone in this? What do you think?"
Inline WYSIWYG content editors. Built in editor (IE Only), and integrated support for Real Objects Edit-On Pro.
Wow, IE-specific features. Good to see that stupidity crosses all license barriers.
JBoss follows this same idea. The software is open source but the documentation must be paid for. I don't disagree with this because its a business model supporting open source that may work. To JBoss's credit, they do offer a basic manual for free.
1;
They do have public forums and mailing lists that provide user-user help with some assistance from the core developers.
But if you want to get the 'real' documentation right from the developers you've got to pay for it.
Stallman has been talking about this for some time. Although he's talking about free software and not open source software, the idea is the same.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
And that is exactly what we are working on at WebGUI.nl.
sig not found
Well, since you asked:
Finding God in a Dog
In case anyone wants to find out more or download WebGUI while the main site is Slashdotted, here is a link to the SF.net development page.
Some projects on SourceForge (OpenCV comes to mind) use Yahoo Groups for their discussions, which is annoying. Yahoo is making its "customers" sign more and more restrictive agreements, they spam, and they put ads in the middle of the forums of others. It's time to move such discussions to SourceForge's own forum system, or to Netnews, rather than using Yahoo, with their "interruption-based advertising".
and it is located at WebGUI.nl.
It has been widely discussed, for years, that paying for support is completely in tune with the stated and unstated philosophy of the GNU Public License.
End of discussion.
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
I've never seen so many people so horribly confused.
For everyone who is running off at the mouth saying "You greedy open source people, this is how they are supposed to make money, paying for support is fine, stop demanding everying for free, etc", wake up and actually read the article.
Nobody is complaining that they are charging for documentation or support. The problem here is they are making their customers basically sign an NDA that prevents them for sharing any knowledge they gain from the documentation with others. This has nothing to do with copyrights, and it is nothing like photocopying a manual. This is about you promising to never help anyone you know who has the same software. Microsoft does not sue me if I tell you a Windows XP trick I read about in a book by Microsoft Press.
Personally, I don't hold this against the webGUI people. It is their right if they want to do it, but damn, what a crappy business model. That will only provide them with a revenue stream until some code savvy customers write their own documentation from the source code (which from other posts looks like it has already happened)
So really there is nothing to see here folks. Just another company trying yet another flawed way to make money using open source software.
As to the broader topic everyone seems to be bringing up about how this is a fatal flaw in open source (namely that companies cannot figure out how to make money off it), there is no problem. Nobody cares if companies can figure out how to make money off of every tiny little open source project out there. The larger ones have funding from companies that use them (IBM funds Apache and some others) and the rest are written by people in their spare time or as part of their job.
I make money with open source software by using it to solve my company's (well, university's) problems. I also make enhancements to various packages we use and feed them back to the community. Everyone benefits and I still get paid.
If you are a programmer who thinks you should be getting a six figure salary because you can write a little software utility, then cries when the open source community makes a better one for free, tough luck. Either evolve with the times or get left behind. The days when you can whip out a little program and charge for it are done. If it is truely a good program, you can bet someone else will be motivated to reimplement the concept as an open source project. It may not have happened yet (Gimp is not a complete replacement for Photoshop for example) but over time it will.
Finkployd
We spend years learning to code, starting from "hello world!" to actually developing an application that is desired by many people. We do all this not to make ourselves rich, we do our coding as a series of steps leading to personal enlightenment. We of course know how our code works, and if we release our code at all, we release it as gpl and hope that those who are interested are motivated enough to spend the minimal amount of time to learn how the code works to use it. To those who have not yet figured out how to use the code which we have stuggled so hard to create, I say I am sorry, If we only had a desire to write documentation rather than to code. Of course a solution would be to find a way to combine the talents of coding and the talents of writing documentation in one effort. I would task those of you offer quick condemnation of the coders for doing what they have spent years learning how to do and there lack of writing documentation which meets everyones expectations. I suggest you stand up and fill the gap!! Otherwise I suggest you sit down and read a book or two :)
Thanks
Ummmm, excuse me, but if you're a contractor, and I hire you to write something, that's a work for hire.
No, that is 100% wrong. Copyright in a work done by an independent contractor is by default owned by the contractor. The contract may assign copyright ownership if the agreement is explicit, but even then it is not usually a "work for hire", but rather a transfer of copyright ownership. A contractor's work can only be a work for hire by agreement in 9 specifically enumerated cases that do not include software.
There was a Supreme Court case in the 1980's on the copyright differentiation between the independent contractor vs. work for hire.
Since the original poster, and subsequently many of those responding made a mistake in their interpretation of our membership agreement, we felt it only fair to present the truth.
First, our membership agreement is for the Support Center, which is where our technicians provide answers to specific problems that our customers are experiencing. The poster applied this agreement to WebGUI's manual, Ruling WebGUI, which is a mistake. Ruling WebGUI has its own license which is not much more than a restatement of United States copyright law, saying that you don't have the right to make copies of, or distribute, the book for anything more than your own personal use.
Second, the person who submitted the original story, though making an argument against our NDA, actually has a problem with paying for services of any kind. He made no claims against our NDA when he was posting on our discussions, nor in any emails to us. Instead his claim was that since WebGUI is open source that everything related to WebGUI should be free (as in beer).
Third, we have taken in your responses about our NDA. Many of you are right, as worded it was unfair. We have decided to reword the NDA to better suit the community. While we're certain that it will not satisfy those of you that believe that no profit should be made from information and services, it should alleviate those of you who want to help out your neighbor with your new-found knowledge.
Fourth, the intent of our NDA is to protect ourselves from our competitors. It is not meant to stifle knowledge sharing, but instead to stop those that would try to make a profit by our labor. Indeed there have already been several attempts to make this play by various "companies".
Finally, a comment about the business of open source software. Many people mistakenly believe that open source software means that the software, beyond sharing its source code, is free of charge. There is no OSI approved license that we are aware of that implicitly states this. Instead they speak loudly to freedom of expression and knowlege sharing.
Furthermore, several posters correctly made the observation that open source needs to find its niche in business, and not the other way around. Like it or not we live in a world of capitalism. And in our world of capitalism small businesses drive the economy. If small businesses like Plain Black are not able to survive on an open source model (and I'm not saying that our model is the best or only) then open source is doomed to be a hobbist's affair. Everyone who works at Plain Black strongly believes in open source. If we didn't we wouldn't build our business around it. But at the same time, if profits are unsustainable in the open source world, then the economy of open source will wither and die; and the funding for all but the biggest of projects will die with it.