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The Covenant - a New Open Source Strategy
Bruce Perens writes "Lexis Nexis has Open Sourced HPCC, the parallel software that they use for handling extremely large data. Databases that, for example, hold records for every consumer in the U.S. can be processed with this software and its task-specific language. As Strategic Consultant for the company while they decided to participate in Open Source, Open Source co-founder Bruce Perens designed a new Covenant between Lexis Nexis and the Open Source community that makes dual-licensing more fair to the Open Source developer."
Hi AC,
Since I did advise Lexis Nexis to use the Affero GPL 3.0, a license of the Free Software Foundation, and they have done so, I think this should not be considered as "dissing free software" :-)
And yes, it really is ironic that GPL can be used to drive commercial development and that people will pay you for the right to not be under the GPL terms. But this is not dissing free software, it's commenting on the economic paths that it creates.
Bruce Perens.
Consider why people want to have their work accepted by the project, rather than just maintain their modification independently. Consider the hoops that companies jump through just to get Linus to accept their patches. Now, consider that LN will maintain your modification for you with paid employees, if they accept it. Yes, there is value in that.
Bruce Perens.
People can already "build on it", yes -- but they would have to fork it to do so, and there's a LOT of reasons why you may want to contribute upstream and not fork your own.
For one thing, if you care about whatever your project is that is using the software, you want to stay as close to the main line of development is as possible -- since its being actively developed and maintained by a paid group of people, in addition to whatever the community contributes.
For another, if you /don't/ get your change to the upstream, then that is a burden on you forever -- you will have to maintain that change as the main line evolves. Your patches won't apply cleanly forever. Now, you may just dump out a patch and move on and never upgrade, and if that's what you wanna do.. okay, fine.
There's lots and lots more. If you can't see why wanting to get your changes integrated instead of just forking your own isn't desirable, well... okay whatever :)
The "covenant" here means that the company is promising something to you in exchange for requiring you assign copyright. Its up to you to decide if the value proposition there is worth it to you -- most other contributor agreements I've seen in the past I thought were kinda greedy (unless it was to a neutral/Open-Source organization such as Python or Apache which I could rely on to not go private), since it was always one-way. This is at least something, and I'm not sure what want more of if I were negotiating -- they couldn't realistically promise my lines be open forever, as code evolves a lot more organically then that.
A promise to either release it all permissively, so /anyone/ who contributed -- be they commercial interests (remember, some of these "contributors" aren't Open Source people per se, who care about GPL or BSD or whatever, but are companies who may use that software and are contributing to the platform) or open source users can use it how they like.... or to support and maintain it for three years after their last accepted contribution (during which you're free to fork), seems a pretty decent compromise to me.