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SQL-Ledger Relicensed, Community Gagged
Ashley Gittins writes "Users of the popular accounting package SQL-Ledger were being kept in the dark about a recent license change. Two weeks ago a new version of the software was released but along with it came the silent change of license from GPLv2 to the 'SQL-Ledger Open Source License' — presumably in an effort to prevent future forks like LedgerSMB. As it turns out, the author was making deliberate attempts to prevent the community from finding out about the license change. No posts to the SQL-Ledger mailing lists asking about the license change were getting past moderation and direct questions to the author were going unanswered. Just recently the license was switched back to GPLv2. This behavior is not a first for this particular project, and is part of the reason for the original LedgerSMB fork. Does a project maintainer have an ethical obligation to notify his or her community of a license change? What about a legal obligation?"
If the author is the sole author and/or owns all the copyrights, then they can do what ever they like. If, however, they have accepted third party submitions then they may have a legal obligation to remain GPLv2
Forcing people to accept a change in the license without telling them? Definitely unethical - kind of like forcing people to accept Windows Genunie Advantage if you want patches.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
No. There's only a problem if someone made a fork and tried to change it from GPL to something else. This was a move by the guy who holds the copyrights to the code. the copyright holder can, at anytime, decide he wants to move his code to another license. the catch is that all previously released code is still under the previous license. That is, if i release Foobar v1 under the GPL, then I release Foobar v1.1 under BSD, v1.0 remains licensed under the GPL, and you are free to take that code and start your own version, Forkbar v1.0. However, you must always keep it as GPL, because you don't own the copyright on the code; you only have access to it because of the GPL.
my pet machine
Simader is a putz and always has been. That project is the worst of programming with Perl ever -- its a contraption. Its developed like any 'job security' program would be, using a rube goldberg approach when ever possible. Any attempt to integrate with that project with anything has always met with his poison. Much rather put my efforts into something like http://frontaccounting.com/ rather than SQLL. Even though I am a perl zealot.
Finally the death of his project.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
I have been writing accounting software of my own lately (http://www.thinkcomputer.com) that also does taxes, and licensing has come up in the past week for me, as well. I used the PDFlib 6 library with PHP, which I paid over $1,400 for, to create PDF files so that my software could prepare tax returns, and all was working fine until my server crashed in March. I was forced to upgrade to new hardware, which I did, in the form of two Sun Fire X2200 servers running Linux. Installing PDFlib on my new setup didn't work, because even though my server had two processors, and I had a license for two processors, PDFlib detected four logical processors (each AMD CPU is dual-core). This was irritating on its own, but the fact that the newer version of PDFlib, version 7, uses a *different* system-based license (and of course they didn't tell anyone) that makes the number of logical processors irrelevant, means that the PDFlib acknowledge the flawed nature of their original license. When I asked them for assistance, since I needed to get my software up and running again, their response was that I should pay them $2,700 more in license fees for version 6 (more than the cost of the server) or $1,194 for a single-system upgrade to the new licensing scheme of version 7 (more than the cost of the original single-CPU license for version 6). To me, it sounded like extortion, but since the company is in Germany they can get away with it easier I suppose.
Needless to say, I'm never using PDFlib again, and I'm re-writing all of my code to use FPDF (http://www.fpdf.org), which is free, and works just as well. It's even easier to write code for. Stay away from PDFlib!
If you want reliability and future commitment, perhaps you should pay for it?
... tough. Paying for it doesn't mean anything in and of itself. Consequently, you have no assurance of anything in the software world unless you're dealing with a vendor that has a significant track record of playing square with its customers. Still no guarantee, but that's about as good as it gets, and it is true whether it's open source or not, commercial or not.
That doesn't always work either. Just read the EULA for, well, pretty much any piece of commercial software. If the vendor disappears, decides not to support the product, if it vaporizes your computer and most of the building its in
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
* Retroactively re-license existing versions from the GPL to the new version: * Unlaterally re-license code that includes third part submissions, since most of the translation packages were done by user submission.
Ignoring those two actions, even if the license change is strictly legal, it's downright underhanded to pull a stunt like he did. He didn't just change the license on his software; he put out a point release on the primary distribution site, after having changed the license terms included with the package, then refused to let anyone bring it up on the official support mailing list. How many of us would notice if we downloaded and installed the lastest apache or postfix or whatever, and the license had silently and magically changed to a closed one?
I am a core member of the LedgerSMB development team. The author of this post ran it by me as a courtesy before submitting it.
In the time since this was submitted, Mr Simader has seen the light and reverted to the GPL, albeit very unhappily. Such is life.
I don't actually begrudge Mr Simader the right to choose whatever copyright license he wants to have for his work. That is his moral right, and I have no problem with it. However, I was very unhappy with the fact that a lot of contributors' code, including all the translations, were still licensed under the GPL and since his new license was not compatable with it, I felt that he was causing problems for everyone including our project which is why I began contacting contributors privately about the whole thing.
Also, in the event of a license change away from a specific and well-understood OSI-approved license, I think that the developer also needs to give users a heads-up before they install the new version. This is, however, as far as I see the ethical obligations. And even these were not followed.
Finally, on the LedgerSMB project we are committed to rewriting the entire application, not just in order to prevent further conflict with Mr Simader but also in order to create a better program and one which can be more easily maintained. But we would be remiss if we didn't recognize that our success is in fact partly based on his.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
There are actually rather a lot of free and open source accounting packages around.
* Front Accounting
* Ledger SMB
* WebERP
* OpenAccounting
* TurboCash
o Windows
* GnuCash
* Personal
o HomeBank
o jGnash
o GFP
o Grisbi
* CK-Ledger
* Compiere
* Lazy8
* Quasar
o Linux Canada
* phpCOIN
* opentaps
* Bambooinvoice
* GnuAccounting
* phpOrganisation
* OpenBravo
They are in various states of repair and different markets from the personal to the one man band to the multinational.
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