Re: [xwiki-dev] Considering a licence change

On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 11:12:23PM +0200, Ludovic Dubost wrote: [..] This could prove as a show stopper when it comes to attracting new developers - imho nobody really wants to sign such an agreement for just submitting a patch. drastically said, this double licensing could look from a committers point of view like this: 'they make money by selling my code to closed-source producing companies which don't want to give anything back to the project'. A developer who wants his code being used in commercial software usually won't choose "GPL+giving expertnet the right to release his code under other licenses", but choose a commercial-friendly license like ASL right from the start. On the other hand, when there is a number of developers interested in the project, who like the GPL but not the dual licensing option, it could lead to a fork into a GPL-only branch and a dual licenseable branch, which imho is not desirable. Imho the better way to make money of such a project is getting paid for new features and support/hosting. Selling software licenses is what companies like the one from Redmond, USA, do, and usually is considered a bad practice ;-) Besides that, I think that XWiki is more a product than a library, and I can't imagine that many cases where a company will pay for being allowed to embed XWiki into their own product. In most cases, people will simply use XWiki for themselves, customized to fit their needs or not, which already is permitted by GPL. But maybe I underestimate the possibilities in this sector. You get the point, I'm no fan of the dual licensing option. LGPL is problematic, as there is often doubt about where the line between allowed use and license violation is drawn. In my company, if we have the choice, we always choose ASL'd libs over LGPL'd ones, just to be on the safe side. So if you really want to open up the license, I'd vote for ASL. On the other hand, there is still option 3/: Don't dual license any more and let XWiki stay GPL, which solves the problem of handling contributions, too. Not really an opening in terms of licensing, though... [..] right, but it would be nicer to have the whole code share the same license. In my understanding they have to stay GPL'd as long as XWiki is GPL'd, since I'm extending XWiki base classes in the plugins. Greetings from germany, Jens -- Jens Krämer jk(a)jkraemer.net