Reading Maffulli’s comment on my last post I learn that Alfresco, previously using the Mozilla Public License with the discussed attribution provision, yesterday moved to GPL. As reported by Stephen Shankland Matt Asay, Alfresco’s Vice President of Marketing, said:
We wanted the code to be bigger than the company. People basically know what (the GPL) means, so there’s no time wasted wondering (about) MPL.
Talking about why makes sense use GPL-compatible licenses I mentioned that you can take advantage of lots of programs and libraries licensed under GPL, and it looks like if Matt confirmed this the case:
In addition, Alfresco will be able to easily integrate with other GPL projects, such as the Drupal content management software.
I believe that Matt played a very important role in Alfresco’s decision, he recently wrote “Why you need the GPL” explaining clearly that in his poinion the GPL is the best way:
It’s not about evil. It’s about what works. It’s about making money with free/open source as your ally, and not a weak alibi.
But it’s not the first time as you can see here (07/04/05):
The GPL is one of the most exciting, innovative capitalist tools ever created.
and here (31/05/04):
Absolutely. People tend to describe the GPL as highly restrictive. It is, in a sense, but it’s also liberating, and a great competitive tool.
About the GPLv3 debate he said:
We’d really like to go version 3 when it comes out, if it remains as planned. Until then, though, the software remains only under GPL 2.
Good news for my FSF friends, indeed.
Alfresco added to the GPL license a “FLOSS exception” to allow the software to be embedded in other open source software licensed with other licenses, as Matt explained:
With the exception, those other projects don’t have to worry about a potential requirement to release their own software under the GPL.
So let’s now how fast Alfresco will eventually move from the Corporate production model to an hybrid one, that I wish them to be as symbiotic as possible!
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