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."

Comments

Re:Bruce Perens dissing Free Software

[Bruce Perens]

So this is fuel on the old discussion between "Open Source" (Bruce Perens et al) and Free Software (RMS et al)?

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.

Re:Complicated

[Bruce Perens]

Unnecessarily complicated. If it's already under Affero GPL then people can already build on it-"contributing the product to a non-profit" doesn't add anything to that and there's no reason to assume that people who choose to contribute to a GPL project want to have their code licensed under BSD anyway (and vice versa) - some will be happy with this but others won't. On balance, what's the point?

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.