FOSS Licenses & Business Models

INF5750Oct 25 2005Knut Staring

What are licenses?

● Legal documents – EULA● Uncertain legal status, have not been subject to

much scrutiny by courts● Interest by legal scholars and economists● “Constitutions” of FOSS communities● Statements of philosophy

Frequency of FOSS licenses

Two major licensing “camps”

● GPL (General Public License)

Linux, Emacs, Joomla, MySql

“Viral” - intended to keep and further the reach of Free SW

● BSD (Berkley Software Distribution)

● MIT● Artistic● Apache

– LGPL (Lesser Genereal Public License)

– MPL (Mozilla Public License) - includes “Patent defense”

Philosophies

● Pragmatic● Open to commercial

exploitation● Vague● Very liberal

● Idealistic● duty to share● Strong focus on

community norms● Difficulties around the

term “derived work” and how exactly it works

BSD/MIT/Apache

● “Code created under these licenses, or derived from such code, may go “closed” and developments can be made under that proprietary license, which are lost to the open source community. For the same reason, however, these licenses are very flexible and compatible with almost every form of open source license.”

● “Sendmail, another piece of Berkeley Unix, continues to be maintained by its creator, Eric Allman, who founded a company in 1998 to commercialize the software. He adopted a hybrid proprietary/open source strategy, completely consistent with the licenses, in which some new features of interest to commercial clients are released in proprietary software, while the open source version is also still maintained”

GPL and LGPL: Speeding the spread of FOSS?

● Vetter (2003) ● Problematic to combine GPL and non-GPL

software● Close coupling not permitted, can take place only

through open protocols ● Example: Apache and ObjectWeb (JonAS and

Geronimo) LGPL code not allowed to be licensed under Apache license. Some JonAS components such as ASM and JOTM had to be relicensed under BSD to further cooperation

● eXo portal platform is GPL built on ObjectWeb

The Bitkeeper Controversy

● Sept 1998: Linux as bottleneck: Avoided forking by VGER at Rutgers U. by adopting Bitkeeper from Larry McVoy

● Could be used by FOSS project provided the developers not contribute to other SCM

● Resistance by Alan Cox and others, interoper with CVS, SVN

● April 2005: Andrew Tridgell developed a client to show metadata. Support revoked on July 1.

● Git project started by Linus Torvalds

INF5750 frameworks

● “Despite what you may have heard, you certainly may use an LGPL'd library like Hibernate in a commercial closed-source application”

● Spring is under the Apache 2.0 license● WebWork: Modified Apache (OpenSymphony)● Ruby on Rails: MIT. Ruby: GPL or special● Java: Proprietary. Uncertainty about distribution rights

Business models

● Professional open source● Jboss● MySql● Plone● eZpublish

Huge projects

● OpenOffice: 50 M copies downloaded, version 2.0 comes with HSQL database and supports OpenDocument

● Apache: Webserver, Jakarta ++

Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox

● First and dominating browser● First major company to go open source● Not GPL: MPL and NPL● 100 M downloads of Firefox 1.0● Extensions: AdBlock, Greasemonkey, Dev ++● www.spreadfirefox.com● Firefox 1.5 just about to be launched

Reasons Netscape did not use GPL

Even though they wanted to ensure code would not be appropriated, they found it:

● Incompatible with obligations from some incorporated SW

● Wanted to protect their other SW ● Afraid other companies would reject code released

under GPL

Business models

● Professional open source:● Consultancy, extensions, service● Jboss● MySql● Plone● eZpublish● FreeCode● LinPro

Releasing in-house code

● Bug-fixes● Security● Shared development costs● Documentation● Community involvement● Flexibility and interoperability● Goodwill● Example: