As a long time CentOS (and prior to that, Fedora) shop, we have been taking an interest in these developments. The thing is, as a small business, one of the really appealing things about Open Source is that the friction of licensing is just not there. We could probably qualify for this program, but why would we want to have to worry about auditing ourselves to see if we needed to start paying at some point when we can just switch to Debian or one of the CentOS clones which are in the works? Not that Red Hat
The thing is, as a small business, one of the really appealing things about Open Source is that the friction of licensing is just not there.
False. As a user, the friction isn't there. As a developer, the friction is there - there are plenty of license conflicts - GPLv2 cannot be mixed with GPLv3 (but GPLv2+ can). And it's not just difficult, it can be impossible if you have a mix of GPLv2 and GPLv2+ code - depending o the configuration, the final output may be GPLv2+, but choose the wrong option and it is GPLv2.
In fact, as a developer, you had better be keeping track of your code provenance to make sure you're not making it an impossible situation.
Probably A No Here (Score:5, Interesting)
As a long time CentOS (and prior to that, Fedora) shop, we have been taking an interest in these developments. The thing is, as a small business, one of the really appealing things about Open Source is that the friction of licensing is just not there. We could probably qualify for this program, but why would we want to have to worry about auditing ourselves to see if we needed to start paying at some point when we can just switch to Debian or one of the CentOS clones which are in the works? Not that Red Hat
Re:Probably A No Here (Score:2)
False. As a user, the friction isn't there. As a developer, the friction is there - there are plenty of license conflicts - GPLv2 cannot be mixed with GPLv3 (but GPLv2+ can). And it's not just difficult, it can be impossible if you have a mix of GPLv2 and GPLv2+ code - depending o the configuration, the final output may be GPLv2+, but choose the wrong option and it is GPLv2.
In fact, as a developer, you had better be keeping track of your code provenance to make sure you're not making it an impossible situation.