The Covenant - a New Open Source Strategy 108
Bruce Perens writes "Lexis Nexis has Open Sourced HPCC, the parallel software that they use for handling extremely large data. Databases that, for example, hold records for every consumer in the U.S. can be processed with this software and its task-specific language. As Strategic Consultant for the company while they decided to participate in Open Source, Open Source co-founder Bruce Perens designed a new Covenant between Lexis Nexis and the Open Source community that makes dual-licensing more fair to the Open Source developer."
Complicated (Score:1, Interesting)
the product is to be dual-licensed under the Affero GPL 3.06 and a commercial license. In exchange for each copyright assignment from an Open Source developer, the company will covenant to continue to support and maintain the Open Source version of their product for a period of three years – they won't take it private during that time. The three-year clock will start anew every time there's another copyright contribution. If the company cannot continue to support and maintain the product as Open Source, HPCC systems promises either to contribute the product to a non-profit under permissive licensing like BSD, or to remove the developer's contribution, and all others for which the three-year clock is still running, from the product.
Unnecessarily complicated. If it's already under Affero GPL then people can already build on it-"contributing the product to a non-profit" doesn't add anything to that and there's no reason to assume that people who choose to contribute to a GPL project want to have their code licensed under BSD anyway (and vice versa) - some will be happy with this but others won't. On balance, what's the point?
Re:Complicated (Score:4, Interesting)
People can already "build on it", yes -- but they would have to fork it to do so, and there's a LOT of reasons why you may want to contribute upstream and not fork your own.
For one thing, if you care about whatever your project is that is using the software, you want to stay as close to the main line of development is as possible -- since its being actively developed and maintained by a paid group of people, in addition to whatever the community contributes.
For another, if you /don't/ get your change to the upstream, then that is a burden on you forever -- you will have to maintain that change as the main line evolves. Your patches won't apply cleanly forever. Now, you may just dump out a patch and move on and never upgrade, and if that's what you wanna do.. okay, fine.
There's lots and lots more. If you can't see why wanting to get your changes integrated instead of just forking your own isn't desirable, well... okay whatever :)
The "covenant" here means that the company is promising something to you in exchange for requiring you assign copyright. Its up to you to decide if the value proposition there is worth it to you -- most other contributor agreements I've seen in the past I thought were kinda greedy (unless it was to a neutral/Open-Source organization such as Python or Apache which I could rely on to not go private), since it was always one-way. This is at least something, and I'm not sure what want more of if I were negotiating -- they couldn't realistically promise my lines be open forever, as code evolves a lot more organically then that.
A promise to either release it all permissively, so /anyone/ who contributed -- be they commercial interests (remember, some of these "contributors" aren't Open Source people per se, who care about GPL or BSD or whatever, but are companies who may use that software and are contributing to the platform) or open source users can use it how they like.... or to support and maintain it for three years after their last accepted contribution (during which you're free to fork), seems a pretty decent compromise to me.