On 3/14/07, Kingsley Idehen <kide...@openlinksw.com> wrote:
> OK, clear. The reason I thought the earlier case applied to Virtuoso
> was because
> http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowRequireFee
> says "The GPL is a free software license, and therefore it permits
> people to use and even redistribute the software without being
> required to pay anyone a fee for doing so."
>
> I also saw no preamble for licensing conditions in addition to the GPL
> when I downloaded Virtuoso, nor when I looked ate the LICENSE and
> COPYING file that were included.
The GPL is sbout Free Distribution and propagation of these rights (the
"Speech" component). Thus, you can propagate Virtuoso's GPL edition as
long as each destination preserves the inherent distribution freedoms
that include source.
Fully understood. But the GPL is about more than free distribution:
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html. In any case, if a
commercial/non-commercial clause such as you describe applies to Virtuoso,
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/categories.html#semi-freeSoftware would
classify it as "semi-free software". It's a bit muddy to me what that means
for GPL-compatibility.
Bottom line, any application built atop Virtuoso's GPL edition will need
to expose it source code too. If this is done then everyone is treated
fairly. On the other hand if someone builds a hosed app. where there is
no access to the source code then the freedoms from Virtuoso are no
longer available to others.
Ah, a great point! Are you following the GPLv3 discussions? If not you might
want to look into that. The GPLv2 is all about copyright; with a hosted app
the app itself is not being made available, only it's services are, and as
such source delivery is not required. This, in addition to patent issues, is
one of the main issues the GPLv3 aims to address.
Anyhow, commercial use and source delivery are very different issues. If I
write the GPL app and I deliver source to whomever, I cannot know whether
it's use will be commercial or non-commercial. I'm not sure the GPLv3 would
even address this, but a simple addition of a non-commercial-use stipulation
to the LICENSE file might (this is, quite obviously, not legal advice).
I hope this clears matters?
Well, it certainly clarifies the intent of OpenLink :) I am not a lawyer by
any means, but at the previous place I worked I was ( a.o.) the liaison to
the legal dept to discuss (again, a.o.) the licensing aspects of the
components we intended to use, so this discussion has similarities to
discussions I had then. And I do love a good discussion :)
Anyhow, the intent is really much more important to me than the actual
letter of the license in this case, and the intent is clear: no
free-loading. I just think that licensing issues are important in principle,
and interesting.
BTW - I would be very much welcome your potential participation in this
project :-)
I just see now, you're Kidehen! Very interesting interview with Jon! I just
got back from a Sharepoint 2007 course, and all during the day the thought
"I bet I could do that with Virtuoso!" kept popping into my head. Loads of
potential to this product.
I'm not a database internals geek, so I don't think I could (safely) help
out on the core product. But I've done loads and loads of CMS work, and with
Virtuoso I feel I've hit on a solid base for an idea that's been in my head
for ages -- a robust CMS/appserver with proper WebDAV support. I've looked
at tens, maybe hundreds of CMSses over the years, and they all come up short
in my opinion. Pretty much all of them use web-based editors, which are OK
if you must edit your site on the road, but for editors that spend much time
on writing content, using mainly their own PC, it just doesn't make sense
when there's applications like Frontpage, DreamWeaver, MS Office, or even
NVu or OpenOffice with WebDAV support, and none of the problems (textbox
size limitations, finicky javascript problems, session timeouts, etc) that
plague web-based surrogates.
The idea for WebDAV as the principal means of editing site content hit me
way back when I was still working on the Midgard CMS, and it has never been
far from my mind since. I dabbled with Plone/Zope, which worked great, until
the 2.7 to 2.8 or so migration totally broke WebDAV editing, with zero
interest in getting it fixed ("we have a web editor, use that"). With
Virtuoso, the WebDAV capability is part of the speclist against the core DB,
and the CMS part would just build from that, instead of a DAV interface
loosely bolted against an existing CMS.
Phew, that was longer than I thought it would be. Anyhow, I'll be toying
with Virtuoso to see how it'd fit into the projects I have lined up.
Emile
