Re: [OSCOM] are the collaborative licenses approved by OSI?

Hi Michael,

>>We even launch a new association to promote what we call "fair source 
>>license" (=enforcing a strong quid pro quo paradigm) and also launch a 
>>new web site to avoid confusion: www.collaborativesource.org
>><http://www.collaborativesource.org/>
>
>interesting. Just being curious, what is your experience with the 
>collaborative source license so far?

Really, really good!

Initially our only goal was to enforce a strong quid pro quo paradigm for 
the Jahia project which was initially a proprietary product (= every user 
of the technology has to contribute something either in cash or in kind). 
Like many, we are a small software company and if we wanted to be able to 
continue to assign some long term 100% dedicated  ressources to the 
development, maintenance, support,.... of the product we needed cash to pay 
salaries. We think that the "professional open source" model (think Jboss 
;-) ) = working the day for an IT services company and the night on 
developing your product or = billing your services at an higher rate to 
indirectly sponsorize your development effort is not a long term viable and 
competitive option (but that's our point of view, I agree ;-) ).

Of course you can do quite the same (= enforcing some "fair equitable 
license" paradigms) with the dual GPL-Commercial license but this is not 
without certain issues and this may rapidyl become complex (cf: the 
Exoplatform project - http://www.exoplatform.com ). For example, if a 
contributor only wants to contribute his enhancements in GPL you have to 
refuse them else you get a problem with your commercial license. Even if 
the customer accepts to give you full rights to sublicense his 
enhancements, the dual license does not stipulate how you can then value 
his contributions. So such a situation may lead to finally have a locked 
CVS (cf: MySQL where MySQL AB need to insure that they own 100% of the IP 
rights in their CVS) or a community of users which are active contributors 
but, despite their contributions, still needs to buy some commercial 
licenses (for example if they work within a organisation which do not 
accept GPL license internally due to the viral effect...). With the 
GPL-Commercial business model, you will also try to bill intermediaries as 
you can not directly bill the end-customers (for example MySQL wanted us to 
pay some MySQL commercial licenses because we pre-packaged some MySQL 
config files, so this just leads to crazy business models where you try to 
bill the intermediaries which are helping you promote and evangelize your 
product because you know you will not be able to bill the end-users!).

So, briefly speaking we wanted to push (=force) the customer to contribute 
(in cash or in kind) and to avoid technology free-riders (who are then 
"taxed" by a license fee). The generated revenues allow us to pay full time 
dedicated software developers, to insure a better customer support, to pay 
lawyers, fiduciaries, etc. On the other side, all the customers which agree 
to contribute and to play the community and collaborative game gets some 
free or discounted licenses pro rata the value of their contribution.

So it is really a win-win situation (and indirectly there is also a big win 
for the open source, as we try to mostly rely on open source infrastructure 
layers. So as you mentionned, we contribute quite a lot of stuff (and will 
continue more and more) to the Apache projects (in Jackrabbit, in Slide 
with one of our employee being a committer, indirectly in Jetspeed by 
mandating some of the committers to work on our behalf, etc...).

Finally, large organisations (we are working with the European Parliament, 
the French Ministery of Finance, Alstom, Brandt, Valeo, St-Gobain...) do 
not want unsupported software (or which may risk to become unsupported if 
some of the key committers suddently leave the project for one reason or 
the other). They want a stable, long term company which can provide some 
warranties on the perennity of the software. Moreover they do not have any 
problem to buy a license. What they want today is to avoid some vendor 
lock-in and to be able to easily customize themselves (or through their 
usual system integrator) the code for integration purposes. So they want 
access to the full source code but not necessarily that this code is free 
(like in a free beer).

But this is a long debate and I do not think this is the right place to do 
it ;-). If you are interested to discuss it, you may use this mailing list: 
http://softdevelcoop.org/ Please post your flames there ;-)

>><http://www.collaborativesource.org/>What's funny is that you can 
>>perfectly use a dual license GPL-Commercial (e.g. eZPublish) in OSCOM 
>>with all the limitations it creates but not a collaborative source 
>>license which globally is following the same philosophy/business model 
>>(sorry I do not like the dual license thing, this creates too much 
>>confusion for the end-customers but that's my point of view, I totally 
>>agree ;-) )
>
>to be honest I never thought about it and I am glad you are mentioning it
>and it should definitely be discussed here

Everything depends if OSCOM tries to regroup all CMS with source code 
available for the customers (e.g. Atlassian Confluence) or only ones with 
source freely available for everyone but with certain reestriction on 
execution (= Jahia) or only free and open source projects (FOSS projects). 
There are some subtle nuances here ;-)

>>... So no problem for me (and even if I had a problem with it, this 
>>wouldnt have change anything, no? ;-) ) to remove Jahia from your list if 
>>you want to focus the association on 100% OSI compliant products only.
>
>I think it's important to note what is OSI certified and what isn't
>and quite probably remove projects which aren't using OSI certified licenses,
>because Open Source should have a definition and the meaning should be 
>clarified

100% agree! Cf above.


>>BTW: you may also add Apache Jackrabbit in the matrix
>
>yes, should have done this quite some time ago ;-)
>I was told that Jahia contributed an "SQL-implementation" to Jackrabbit, 
>right?

Yes that's true (Hibernate and OJB ones). Perhaps we will use some of the 
Lenya code soon ;-). As mentionned we estimate that all our "infrastructure 
layers" should be 100% released under FOSS license terms and conditions but 
not always the ready to use final end user product.

Moreover this is quite stupid because if we released a "light" version of 
Jahia under a FOSS license (e.g. Jahia Blog/wiki Edition) and a "pro" 
version only under a proprietary license (e.g. Jahia enterprise edition) we 
would be considered as an open source company even if most of our code was 
only part of our proprietary edition. So, on our side, we clearly think 
that this is better to provide 100% of the our code rather than playing 
this "open source framework / proprietary final product" game. So we tried 
to find a right balance with this "fair source license" paradigm.

Cheers,
Stéphane


>Michi
>
>>
>>Cheers,
>>Stéphane
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------
>>Stéphane Croisier <scroisier-QHyKyf/[email protected]>
>>CEO
>>Jahia Ltd, 45 rue de la gare, 1260 Nyon (Switzerland)
>>Jahia : The Collaborative CMS and Corporate Portal Solution
>>_ http://www.jahia.com <http://www.jahia.com/>_ (commercial web site)
>>_ http://www.jahia.org <http://www.jahia.org/>_ (collaborative web site)
>>-------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>At 17:25 26.02.2005, Michael Wechner wrote:
>>
>>>Does anyone know if the collaborative licenses are approved by the OSI?
>>>
>>>E.g.
>>>
>>>http://www.jahia.org/jahia/page145.html
>>>
>>>it doesn't seem to be listed here
>>>
>>>http://www.opensource.org/licenses
>>>
>>>or does it comply with
>>>
>>>http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mitrepl.php
>>>
>>>?
>>>
>>>Thanks
>>>
>>>Michi
>>>
>>>--
>>>Michael Wechner
>>>Wyona Inc.  -   Open Source Content Management   -   Apache Lenya
>>>http://www.wyona.com
>>><http://www.wyona.com%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0/> 
>>>http://lenya.apache.org <http://lenya.apache.org/>
>>>[email protected]                        [email protected]
>>>
>>>
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>General mailing list
>>>[email protected]
>>>http://oscom.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/general
>>
>>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
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>>
>
>
>--
>Michael Wechner
>Wyona Inc.  -   Open Source Content Management   -   Apache Lenya
>http://www.wyona.com                     http://lenya.apache.org
>[email protected]                        [email protected]