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Can an Open Source Project Be Acquired?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-just-don't-get-this-one dept.

prostoalex writes "Can an open source project be acquired? ZDNet's Between The Lines says yes, one just did. Software startup JasperSoft acquired Sourceforge-based project JasperReports, which involved acquiring the copyrights and hiring the lead developer for the project." I guess the point he tries to make is that the new corporate overloads can essentially have a free and non-free version of the code, and more or less orphan the free version. The problem of course is that if the non-free version gets good, others will simply fork.

2 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. Nothing wrong with that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We've always known that an author can remove the license on software they wrote. Of course, that doesn't change YOUR license, and they do still need to provide access to the source if it was under the GPL, specifically, when you got it. However, they're under no obligation to give you updates or changes from future versions of their own code.

    So, the corporate buyout angle is a red herring. This is no different from any developer taking their ball and going home.

  2. Re:I'm sorry, what? by sylvandb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sometimes the code for an open source project pretty much just disappears. I'd say that makes the open version much worse off than the closed version.

    http://dvarchive.sf.net/ or http://www.sf.net/projects/dvarchive/

    It was GPL licensed, but the original author changed the license terms and managed to get sourceforge to delete everything that had once been available from the SF page. For a year or more he had claimed that he had lost the sources and was going to upload when the new version worked. Obviously that didn't happen.

    I think this happened because the project's primary user base was not open source fans, so very few copies of the source were ever archived elsewhere. Apparently, open source developers were never interested enough to create a fork or even keep a copy of the source while the source was available.

    Now the source simply is not available for the current version (3.x), nor even the last versions which were ostensibly GPL'd (2.1 or 3.0). (The license for the current version is not GPL.)

    It has happened with other projects, and will undoubtedly continue to happen. It won't happen any time soon with Linux kernels or emacs, but when something isn't incredibly popular, it can and does happen.

    My lesson leared from this, is to keep a copy of the source for anything and everything in which I am even a little bit interested. Still get burned sometimes though.

    sdb