Re: They've noticed that weird phenomenon, "free open source"!

On 8 February 2013 11:58, Kathinka <[email protected]> wrote:
> So when someone works in an office/dept/school  that has this product, if
> they want to look under the bonnet and maybe tweak it someway that improves
> on or adds to what it does, this is still possible?

First, for GPL-covered products (I address silverstripe below):  If
you "distribute" a product covered by the GPL, and you've made
changes, you must make those changes available under the same license.

It gets a little bit more difficult when you start trying to determine
what "distribute" means. For example, software-as-a-service sometimes
makes use of a loophole: Using software is not the same as
distributing it. I can run a web-app based on GPL-covered code, change
it, provide you access (possibly charaging you, but because the code
never left my organisation, I haven't distributed it, and I don't need
to publish the sources. The Affero GPL license was created to close
this loophole.

Then there's "Tivoisation" - the process of allowing users access to
the code, but using hardware restrictions to prevent users from
running modified versions of the code. So you can modify the code to
your heart's content, but cannot run that modified code on your
device. The GPL v3 includes clauses to prevent this.


HOWEVER, Silverstripe is licensed under the BSD license, which is one
of the more.... liberal licenses around. The actual license text is:

"""
Copyright (c) 2006-10, SilverStripe Limited - www.silverstripe.com
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
met:

 * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
 * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
 * Neither the name of SilverStripe nor the names of its contributors
may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
without specific prior written permission.

<standard BSD legalese here>

"""
(taken from: http://www.silverstripe.org/bsd-license/)


So to answer your question: probably not. The silverstripe source code
will (probably) remain open souorce, but there's nothing to stop
people from keeping their improvements closed source (i'm assuming
that's what you mean by "Keeping the win-win-win chain of OS").

Cheers,

--
Thomi Richards

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