Licence, GPL, LGPL

Quote from: silent at Aug 22, 2006, 06:28 PM

I may have just convinced myself to release all my work under GPL from now on, and avoid any BSD fiascos.
Undecided

Yep. And I think you should stick to this conviction. "L" stands for "less". Guizmo gave a clue when mentioning Lotus Notes (a strictly commercial app): He wants to use "Tattoo" as a base for his own appl without suffering the "viral" consequences. And he describes it not in more detail - I argue - to prevent potential concurrence between his "Lotusx" and MODx to become obvious. It’s just a guess, though, and I’m not a lawyer - but I can’t detect another motive. Maybe Guizmo corrects me - but as far as I understand, that’s what this is about...

This is 100% incorrect -sorry silent but it just is. The *only* difference between the LGPL and the GPL is that the former can be linked to by non-GPL code and the latter cannot. Since there’s no runtime code linking going on with MODx, there’s no differences between the licences.

I am very interested in having a discussion about this, but please let’s try to keep this fact based and not "I read on slashdot that GPL is teh suck :/" kind of arguments.

EDIT: Just re-read my own post. silent, I wasn’t implying that your argument is of the slashdot variety -- just trying to preempt the discussion before it gets there.

[This is the first released version of the Lesser GPL. It also counts
as the successor of the GNU Library Public License, version 2, hence
the version number 2.1.]

and

This license, the Lesser General Public License, applies to some specially designated software packages--typically libraries--of the Free Software Foundation and other authors who decide to use it.

Quote from: OpenGeek at Aug 22, 2006, 05:54 PM

How is having to release your modifications to MODx (or Tattoo when it becomes available) as GPL a problem? Are you saying you think you would have to release your library as GPL because it involves calls to the MODx API’s? If so, that is not true in my understanding. If it required core MODx files to be modified, then you would need to distribute the modified MODx as GPL and your library as LGPL; but otherwise, I don’t understand the issue being debated.

That’s perfectly correct and exactly what we said before your post

Quote from: OpenGeek at Aug 22, 2006, 05:54 PM

Just to prove a point, say I change my mind and decide to release my 1.0 rewrite of MODx (or Tattoo, or whatever you want to call it) under GPL after all. What real advantage does that give to anyone other than someone wanting to redistribute and profit from that code without publishing their changes to it? Let me answer that as well: none.

In fact, there are some but i think the subject goes a little far away of my initial topic subject (my question to be exact). Anyway, i agree with you as i’m clearly not a fan of this choice orientation and doesn’t encourage others to follow this kind of direction.

Quote from: OpenGeek at Aug 22, 2006, 05:54 PM

And I’d just as well not have my code, improved or not, taken over by an organization or individual, and then sold as a commercial product by that organization or individual, without the changes being published back out as open-source. The reason for this is simple: if that happens, my investment in creating the thing in the first place is at risk; the proprietary offering could potentially render my offering obsolete. I want to share my work and the ability to profit from it, but I think it reasonable to expect those who decide to use it, improve upon it, or package it up and sell it for money, to adopt the same philosophy, at least in regards to their use of that work.

Hmmm, I may have just convinced myself to release all my work under GPL from now on, and avoid any BSD fiascos.
:-\

Same thing, that would be the subject of a deeper discussion but as i know, that can’t be true.
Let’s say you build a php framework on BSD. That would allow someone to build a commercial CMS relying on your framework for example. But no one is allowed to distribute a commercial framework relying on your framework. The idea is the derivative work can’t compete directly with your product.

Quote from: silent at Aug 22, 2006, 06:28 PM

Yep. And I think you should stick to this conviction. "L" stands for "less". Guizmo gave a clue when mentioning Lotus Notes (a strictly commercial app): He wants to use "Tattoo" as a base for his own appl without suffering the "viral" consequences. And he describes it not in more detail - I argue - to prevent potential concurrence between his "Lotusx" and MODx to become obvious. It’s just a guess, though, and I’m not a lawyer - but I can’t detect another motive. Maybe Guizmo corrects me - but as far as I understand, that’s what this is about...

lol, you have here impressive suspicions and very quickly by the way
Of course i do not describe in details as first, it’s not the subject of the topic and second, i doubt that it really interests someone until a concrete work is ready to be shown, on the contrary it would be another vaporware, a thing i don’t like to do.

Ok, let’s start by the begining, the licence purpose itself.
1. i’am not telling GPL is a bad choice, it depends of what kind of product we are talking about and what is the licence adapted for this product.

2. I definitly not searching for a LGPL Tattoo for the reasons you mentionned. If you read my posts, you will see i said the contrary.

3. There are some things for which GPL is good, but for CMF and framework in general it’s often a problem. If i read well information about Tattoo, it’s also a CMF so i’m concerned by this subject.

4. In general, some people who promote free opensource software and choosed LGPL did it for very good reasons. I see much more people explaining why they choosed LGPL instead of those explaining their GPL choice (and i truely regret the majority i talk with just didn’t think about licensing issue, choosing by default GPL just because others do). If you want, i can give you some extract of their speech about, you will see that they are clearly and obviously not "less" intelligent than others, really far from that. Again GPL is good for some things as LGPL is good for others and BSD is also good for others... and here i don’t even talk about the kind of actors, their context and so on, so a licence choice is not necessary an easy thing. The only thing i can say is that i’m against the : "whatever the situation, whatever the actors, whatever the community, whatever the product or kind of product... the licence has always to be the X one". So X can be GPL, LGPL, BSD or the martian one, it does not matter.

About these speechs and for more information about Licencing, i invite you to have a look on the Marc Fleury article http://jboss.org/jbossBlog/blog/mfleury/2004/08/02/From+GPL+to+BSD+to+LGPL%3A+On+the+Issue+of+Business+Friendliness.html, he has an interesting talk about BSD, LGPL and GPL.

Martin Cracauer’s GPL Page http://www.cons.org/cracauer/gpl.html

Like me, they are not people who want to steal informations from others and keep them for themselves and all the bad intentions we have in this topic
Just saying Lotus Notes is commercial so there is no other option for me than wanting to do a commercial things is just astonishing Don’t forget i said i wanted to do an LGPL project i’m not the on who want to build a commercial product, that does not interest me. Let have a look at the exceptional work and community of Prado, let me say you they have think about their BSD choice with good reasons behind, i don’t event say i agree with them, just that they took the question into account, took a decision regarding well balanced ideas and opinions related to the way they want to work and on what they want to work.

As i see, any free opensource project relying on another will bring to the latter popularity and additions both technically and in terms of community. I see here Tattoo as a potential base platform to build things, exactly the kind of things that authors of frameworks would like to see, ie see others to build solutions relying on their work, so i don’t understand you can see things so "black", why having firstly negative points of view especially when it does not correspond to reality, give people bad intentions before discussing and asking some questions.

Just for information : the main difference between the Apache-style license and the LGPL license is that the LGPL license prevents you from creating a commercial product based on your product if the two products have the same nature and "objectives"

Returning to your very first post, in which you do indeed state that you have an LGPL app in mind, I think the answer is that you have to invite people to download MODx and then download your Notes-type-thing. They will need to have downloaded / have available Apache, MySQL and PHP, so I don’t see any issue in also having MODx as another prerequisite.

There’s no particular reason why people couldn’t obtain MODx from your site / CD, and this could easily be a customised version - you may choose to *omit* the default content and certain snippets. Yes, any changes to MODx itself would have to inherit the licence of MODx itself. Or the module/plugin, as appropriate.

A big benefit in unbundling MODx from your application would be that existing MODx users could add your application to their existing MODx installation.

Yes Paul, what you say is what is the closest to my first post, i’m still thinking about it and need to learn more about Modx. That could be a way, it also depends of what kind of flexibility Modx can offer, for example regarding customizations of backend gui interface, modules capabilities and so on.

The idea were also to make things the easiest as possible for the endusers and not telling them : so take this here, take that here, do this or do that, search the quid of the world, the universe and the girl next door and when you have accomplished all of this, you can return here to continue... they could say something like "hey ! stop ! you do the integration work or not ?" if i cariture, that would be as if i were a LAMP package developer telling my users : go retrive linux, look for apache, manage to install and configure mysql and good luck for php (it’s an exageration, just to explain)

Indeed, and that’s why it would be useful for you to have a version of MODx which installed a default page that said "Now install Y". I’m not sure what the merits are of having an installer that installs a GPL app and then an LGPL app. I suspect that if you base it on MODx’s installer the installer would have to be GPL, but your app could remain LGPL.

I can see why you’d want to be clear about the licencing before you plunged into coding something; equally you need to be clear about the capabilities of MODx before you plunge into a licence-choice based upon it.

The Manager (backend gui interface) is theme-able, I don’t actually know how reconfigurable it is.

In terms of the capabilities of modules within the manager, I must say that QuickEdit (the only module bundled with 0.9.2.1) didn’t excite me. Don’t get me wrong, what it does to the front-end is amazing, but it doesn’t really show what can be done with the backend -if you click on the module, QuickEdit just has a help page.

Polls Module was more exciting to me - suddenly it clicked and became obvious that users can add in an app that uses custom tables. I think that’s an excellent example of a module that adds functionality that can be used with MODx.

There’s a new module bundled in the upcoming 0.9.5 gives a good feel for how you can make MODx management better with a module.

Externally, I’d say either module could have been released with any licence - indeed if you look at the Repository Add page, you’ll see many licences available.

So if you can release Notes-a-like as a series of LGPL modules and snippets, without directly reusing GPL code but merely interfacing with it, you should be fine. I think.

Quote from: guizmo at Aug 23, 2006, 06:40 AM

As i see, any free opensource project relying on another will bring to the latter popularity and additions both technically and in terms of community. I see here Tattoo as a potential base platform to build things, exactly the kind of things that authors of frameworks would like to see, ie see others to build solutions relying on their work, so i don’t understand you can see things so "black", why having firstly negative points of view especially when it does not correspond to reality, give people bad intentions before discussing and asking some questions.

Guizmo, my apologies if my view seems "black" or "negative" on this. I am very interested in having this discussion but I simply want to establish that we’re discussing the same thing first.

Quote from: guizmo at Aug 23, 2006, 06:40 AM

Just for information : the main difference between the Apache-style license and the LGPL license is that the LGPL license prevents you from creating a commercial product based on your product if the two products have the same nature and "objectives"

I have to violently disagree with you there. Please show me where in the GPL code it "prevents you from creating a commercial product based on your product if the two products have the same nature and "objectives"". That’s simply not true. There’s *nothing* that prevents you from making a commercial product based on GPL code, regardless of its nature. A perfect example is huge number of RedHat-derived Linux distributions (both free and commercial) which are based off a commercial project (i.e., RedHat), which itself is built on GPL code (i.e., Linux). There are also commercial products built using PHP (like Zend) which is licensed by the GPL.

My point is that different licenses are good for different projects, but I feel pretty strongly that framework type systems (MODx included) should be available under th GPL as that’s the license that best serves the product and its community.

Quote from: PaulGregory at Aug 23, 2006, 09:04 AM

So if you can release Notes-a-like as a series of LGPL modules and snippets, without directly reusing GPL code but merely interfacing with it, you should be fine. I think.

And that’s exactly my previous point. Thanks for summing it up nicely Paul. In fact to extend the point further, you can write your snippets and modules under a BSD-style license or even a completely proprietary one if you so choose. The license of the framework that you use to create your content doesn’t matter.

Quote from: vbrilon at Aug 23, 2006, 09:18 AM

Guizmo, my apologies if my view seems "black" or "negative" on this. I am very interested in having this discussion but I simply want to establish that we’re discussing the same thing first.

I have to violently disagree with you there. Please show me where in the GPL code it "prevents you from creating a commercial product based on your product if the two products have the same nature and "objectives"".

Well, to discuss it in an advanced way, i think we have first to define the precise questions we are interested in and then invite a licence expert into the discussion. Licence issues are far from being obvious and even expert need sometimes to take some time to think and answers questions, even if they seem quite simple and innocent.
If you look into the dokeos forum (dokeos project http://www.dokeos.com), you will see licence discussions and furthermore, they have one or two people there that give very accurate informations about licence, user case, particular scenarios, know how to retrieve implications of "simple" declarations in a licence and other licence headaches... maybe the kind of people we need here.

Quote from: vbrilon at Aug 23, 2006, 09:18 AM

There’s *nothing* that prevents you from making a commercial product based on GPL code, regardless of its nature.

That’s in contradiction in everyting i understand in the GPL but maybe you’re right after all
The only backdoor i know in GPL is that you can build commercial services based on GPL code, but that’s completly different

Quote from: vbrilon at Aug 23, 2006, 09:18 AM

A perfect example is huge number of RedHat-derived Linux distributions (both free and commercial) which are based off a commercial project (i.e., RedHat), which itself is built on GPL code (i.e., Linux). There are also commercial products built using PHP (like Zend) which is licensed by the GPL.

Honestly, i didn’t think about the Linux distribution problematic so i can’t say, i were just believe that we can "sell" the distribution of a linux but not linux itself. Have to check this.
Regarding php, we are just one link away to verify, but PHP is to my mind, licenced under the... php licence, not GPL.

Quote from: vbrilon at Aug 23, 2006, 09:18 AM

My point is that different licenses are good for different projects, but I feel pretty strongly that framework type systems (MODx included) should be available under th GPL as that’s the license that best serves the product and its community.

Ok, i agree that it’s not soluble here as we simply have different opinions. In several situations, projects in GPL are not a problem for me except in one situation : the framework area. I’m not a fan of CMS to be GPL but i can understand it, but it’s also a CMF or if the product is just a framework, it becomes problematic. There’re people out there explaining this in a much better way than me. If you’re interested in, i will try to find again their talk. In the meantime, did you follow the two url links i provided and read the related articles ?