Tomorrow at 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM EDT will take place the “Unraveling the Complexities of the GPL” Webinar. Mark Radcliffe (DLA Piper) and Karen Copenhaver (Choate, Hall and Stewart) will cover the three main issues regarding GPL license use and obligations:
– What constitutes a derivative work?
- What constitutes a separate and independent work?
- What constitutes distribution?
The webinar won’t cover the basics of GPL.
The mission of the CodePlex Foundation - enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities – could be a roaring success. But in order to  create an open, neutral and business friendly environment first some work has to be done.
Alfresco meetup for community and customers took place here in Rome two weeks ago, featuring both John Newton and John Powell, respectively Alfresco CTO and CEO.
I asked few questions to John Powell, learning more about Alfresco licensing story, and about differences between Alfresco Enterprise Edition and Alfresco Labs.
Roberto, I never advocated a move to the Apache license. I simply raised a question. I’m surprised by the amount of misunderstanding that arises from it. Are people so stuck in their own way of thinking that they can’t allow others to ask questions and probe new ways of doing business?
You call our licensing history “hectic.” I call it progressive. We’ve consistently matched the right license for the right phase of the company’s development. I won’t pretend that we always knew exactly why we did X or Z, but then, who does?
You suggest our strategy makes it hard for us to work with governments, and yet government remains one of our top-three verticals. We’re making millions upon millions of dollars with government customers. I am bewildered by your suggestion there.
And as for Funambol, we have the same model (or very similar) as it does. The only difference is that Funambol has given up on trying to sell to enterprise customers, and this is our main type of customer. Other than that, there really is no difference.
So…I’m confused by your post a bit.
Hi Matt,
glad to hear back from you.
I said you start advocating a different license – Apache, not the BSD as I mistakenly wrote initially – because you wrote that Apache licensing could well be even better than GPL. I added I don’t think you will change the license, though. So said, changing three times in a row the license in a couple of years sounds a bit hectic to me. I totally agree we can name it also progressive. I made my personal guess (just a guess) towards GPLv3 in force of the fact that a company can change (for the better) its decisions.
Europe is now looking into open source procurement, did you read it the OSS procurement guideline draft? I would recommend at least the “Acquiring open source software without tenders” and “Tenders specifying open source software or open standards” paragraphs.
How do think proprietary vendors will face this issue?
The difference between Funambol’s and Alfresco’s approach is not merely the customer target, but in the way they distinguish customers from users.
The [Funambol] core value proposition it is about making carriers life easy to provision users’ phones, manage devices (creation, modification, etc) as well as send OTA commands. As a matter of fact enterprises do not need all these features and richness of configurations, and Funambol doesn’t need to upsell its community.
Similar differentiations happen elsewhere, think of how Sangoma funds open source projects delivering appliances that need to be certified (i.e. conformance testing). This is not a critic, but a fact: the client segment is an important building block of any so called (open source) business model.
I like Alfresco, and I linked three different Alfresco PRs giving a picture of how Alfresco’s business strategy is effective. Still I think it is interesting to express opinions on Alfresco’s strategy, maybe giving feedback in a constructive manner (like for the European public procurement thing).
The Open Source Initiative board, after visiting the European Commission, has finally approved the European Union Public license on the 4th of March.
The EUPL 1.1 – the revisited version of the EUPL 1.0 including recommended modifications resulting from the OSI discussion – is supported by the EUPL community. Stakeholders can share opinions and pose questions through the EUPL forums and blog.
Hi Roberto,
Publishing legal instruments with equal value in all EU languages and letting European courts work with it, is really “business as usual” for the European Institutions: Community Law counts million pages, valid in 22 or 23 languages. In case of uncertainty, national courts may ask the European Court of Justice to clarify. It is a simple fact that the GPL V2 and V3 (relative) failure is that FSF was unable to deal with linguistic diversity (that they consider as a major risk; it is true that they do not benefit from a supra-national court to help). Having said that, the EUPL has other merits: the license complies with European flavour of copyright, information to consumer, warranty and liability. The most important however, is that the intention of EUPL promoters is not to compete with the GPL or any other license. The objective is long term: to bring more administrations to license their source. We are at the early beginning of this, but there are currently substantial move in this direction and several Member States consider policies to license under EUPL. Last, the EUPL has a compatibility list (with GPLV2 and other copyleft licenses). This is also unique: it would be interesting to try solving license proliferation through “mutual recognition” between a club of equivalent licenses, sharing the same compatibility list: this would also provide more freedom to developers. Who has comment on this idea? It is a fact – unfortunately – that “compatibility” is seen by the FSF as “compatibility in the one-way direction of GPL, GPLv3 and AGPLv3”. The reverse situation is not even imagined by the FSF, (and by the way, their current web site ignores totally the EUPL – remember Mahatma Gandhi: “First they ignored us…”). A last word about the “biased” comparison I did between the EUPL and GPLv3 during the EOLE event in Paris: Of course you can say it was biased! (since I am a EUPL advocate), but please do not take my comparison as an attack “against” the GPLv3: I just report facts: GPLv3 is about 3 times longer, is full of technical details, is complex (even for a lawyer) and as it is officially valid in English only it may not be the most persuasive license for a German or French administration. Could anyone object? Now if you are happy with GPLv3 and AGPLv3 no problems, go on!
Hi Patrice-Emmanuel,
I am glad you joined the conversation. I think that having a license (EUPL or not) translated in all European languages is a great thing.
What I object to the EC is that you decided to go your way, instead of participating the GPLv3 process, managed with a public and transparent consultation.
What I object to you is your adversarial approach. I believe that opening to FSF licenses is your concern, since you are trying to convince European public administrations to use the EUPL.
Show them that is convenient, that they can still stand on the shoulders of giants, and try harder to consider GPL, and software licensed under the GPL, as your best friend, not a foe.
My two European cents
Roberto Galoppini, and 
P-E Schmitz are discussing.
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