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Can You Be Denied the Right To Support OSS?
jerico.dev writes "I am currently selecting a CM tool for a project. Important condition: the software must be OSI compliant. I considered Alfresco, since they call themselves 'open source.' Then I heard from several of Alfresco's partners that they are not allowed to do projects based on Alfresco's GPL edition because their partnership contract denied them the right to do so. They only can support Alfresco's enterprise edition. But Alfresco's VP of business development Matt Asay told me that their enterprise edition is not OSI compliant. Does anyone in the Slashdot crowd have experience with partner contracts of other OSS vendors? Is it normal that Sun, Red Hat, etc. force their partners to decline projects based on their open source editions? It's probably legal to do so, but do you think it is legitimate and fair?"
Read the original thread - Matt Asay quite specifically dodges the question of whether there is in fact such a restriction. The original poster notes this and repeats the question, with no answer being given.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Wow. This is coming from Matt Asay ( http://news.cnet.com/openroad/ ) who writes the OSS blog for Cnet, routinely blasting people for not being open enough, and routinely praising Alfresco for their OSS efforts.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I was at a studio on a support call. Had to work on a Blue-Red stereo image, so I started using GIMP functions to edit the layers when their attorney came out of his office and said I could only use such-and-such studio-licensed custom program or risk contanimating their intellectual property. Apparently they had software made specifically for them to use, from a small PC-repai expert out of his southern CA office. Needless to say, it couldn't accomplish what the GIMP could do, yet wouldn't let me explain. They cut me a check and kicked me out within 30 minutes despite assuring them that GPL licensing doesn't extend to their content and property. They looked at me like I was a liar the whole time. Meanwhile, I think I should just go back to my old gig. Anyone have any similar anti-OSS establishments railroad you like a municipal court?
The GPL allows developers (and other service providers) to sell themselves into slavery. It doesn't allow them to enslave their users, that's all. I'm not sure if the FSF struck the right balance. It's more acute with the GPLv3 because it explicitly mentions that enslaving service providers is perfectly acceptable, and there are areas where user and service provider roles begin to blur (e.g. you may provide service--storage space and electrical power--to your ISP to run the router on your premises, so they don't have to give you source code for the GPL software on the router).
Nonetheless, restricting your contributors in this way isn't something I'd expect from a healthy free software project.
In addition to that you can always sign your rights away in a contract. If you sign an agreement that you won't compete with a company's commercial product, expect to get sued if you work on an open source project that competes with theirs and they find out about it.
I should point out at this point that I am not a lawyer, but I have had this discussion with a number of them.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There is no such thing as "fairness" when it comes to corporations. This is not a criticism, just an observation. Fairness is a positive yet vague concept that is easily open to interpretation, something corporate legal departments avoid like pro-bono work in the inner-city (zing!). You make your own fairness. Your quickest path to having decisions made your way is to move up to decision maker.
The future ain't what it used to be.
Restrictive contracts and policies are examples of a masculine philosophy that many business leaders erroneourly believe in, the idea that business is a kind of war. Essentially what a company does depends on the philosophy of its leaders, but if the philosophy is wrong then their actions will come to bite them in the end. You can only succeed in business, and life in general, if you have a philosophy which is right. But what's wrong with the philosophy that business is war?
Business is what a person wants it to be, and what they want it to be depends on their personality, which is in turn dependent on their DNA and their life experiences. If they are high on the social dominance orientation then business, for them, is war. If they are low on the social dominance orientation then business, for them, is cooperation or servicing the free market. But whatever they think about business, this does not affect what business actually is. Business is business. Whether people frame it as war or cooperation depends on a person's personality.
A person who is high on the social dominance orientation metric is likely to see business as war, and will seek to use any available means to achieve their purposes. They may believe that the economy is a zero-sum game (ie that no new wealth can ever be created), therefore they will seek to exclude others from gaining any advantage over them. Such people are also likely to be high on Machiavelian intelligence (and mayble also in selfishness and greed). They think that rugged individualism is a better strategy because they perceive the economy as a zero-sum game in which only the most competitive individuals survive.
A person who is low on the social dominance orientation metric is likely to see business as cooperation or collaboration, and will only use means that are acceptable by the business and greater social community. They may believe that the economy is not a zero-sum game (ie that new wealth can be created at any time), therefore they will seek to cooperate with others in a collaborative effort to produce more new wealth by joining forces together. Such people are also likely to be high in agreeableness (and mayble also in empathy and altruism). They think that a communitarian spirit is a better strategy because they perceive the economy as a non-zero-sum game in which only the most creative individuals survive (and, as free and open-source software demonstrates, creativity and wealth-creation is much more easier when people collaborate together).
Thus, what business is, to a person, depends on who a person is, but they should not let their own (mis-)conceptions draw them into making claims about what business is in reality, because this is the line of thinking that destroys science and reason, and the first step in science is to not let one's intellect affect their image about the reality (albeit there are, of course, philosophical objections to the feasibility of this endeavour). Just as a colour is not a colour unless perceived by an eye, but different eyes may perceive the same natural phenomenon as a different colour (eg under conditions as colour blindness), business cannot be something other than business unless people perceive it as such, but what people perceive depends on who they are and how they contextualise and frame the reality.
If you ask me, I have never perceived economy as a zero-sum game, and thus I have never seen business as war. What I see, however, is lots of people who have the wrong ideas about the economy and business and try to make war against other people, including against people who have the correct ideas, and in the process they drive into their war people who never had any intention to participate in their war. It is for this purpose that everyone, no matter how they see business, should be ready to defend themselves during an attack (ie walk calmly while carrying a big stick, doing your own thing and never attacking anyone, but be ready to effectively defend yourself when attacked). But other than that
The problem here is that there's 3 parties, not two: the person wanting support, the Alfresco partner potentially providing support, and the Alfresco owner. The question is whether the Alfresco partner can be denied the right to provide support to the person wanting it. The answer there is, there isn't an answer. The question is incomplete, it's missing information about what the partner has agreed to. In this case, the partner as part of their partnership agreement signed away their right to support the GPL'd version in return for rights to support the enterprise version they wouldn't have had otherwise. It's not just legal for them to do that, it's entirely reasonable and right for them to be able to do that. It's their business, it's their right to decide that the income from enterprise support is greater than the potential loss from not being able to provide support for the GPL'd version. Someone else may think their decision is dumb, but it's their decision to make.
From the standpoint of the person wanting support, legitimate and fair don't enter into it. They're not a party to the partnership agreement, they're not qualified to decide whether Alfresco is treating it's partners fairly or not. It is, however, rather unusual for open-source companies to deny their partners the right to work on the GPL'd version. RedHat, Sourceforge and the like don't impose any such restrictions that I know of. The most they may do is prohibit partners from making use of any non-GPL'd stuff they have access to in the GPL'd projects. I suspect Alfresco is doing this to try and induce people to use the enterprise version instead of the GPL'd version (if you use the GPL'd version, you lose access to the best sources of support). That'd make me twitchy about using their software.
I didn't say it was impossible to make money off of open source. My point is you can't cry to Slashdot when users of open source software find that they have to pay up and go "enterprise" to get business-class features.
My company uses Alfresco for an online collaboration tool between us and our customers. We've been with them for awhile, starting out with the 1.x code base.
We have a license with them to run the Enterprise version, but are not currently paying for support. Our customers are very adverse to change and until we have more than half of them using it it's not worth paying the very high cost of the support contract.
Our install is a little different as we run Liferay on Tomcat 5.5 and use Alfresco as a portlet. We've been working on getting it upgraded to the newest versions of the software, but we don't have any java programmers on staff. We also tried to reach out to Alfresco partners to get some help getting our setup moved to the newest releases, but no one would help us since we're not paying the yearly support.
Honestly it feels like blackmail. Thankfully we found someone who is not working as an Alfresco partner, but had experience with it, even going so far as to use his companies Alfresco support to get help with what is not working. With his help we're getting very close to having it all working.
> disclaimer: I work for Sun.
Then, ask you CEO about open sourcing the applications that were made at his previous company, Lighthouse Design, bought and buried by Sun.
Yes, Diagram!, Quantrix and WetPaint, I am looking at you. If such apps would have been open sourced 10 years ago, the computing landscape would be very different today...
Our CEO has stated publicly that it is his goal to eventually have ALL of our software open sourced and free for use
That is not the way the MySQL licence reads.