FarCry License Changes

[Rusty-22]

I just found this post by Ed Burnette on ZDNet that does a great job
of summarizing the different open source licenses. Its an easy read
for anyone trying to get their head around the main differences
between each..

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=131

Cheers, Steve.

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[modius]

On May 10, 9:06 pm, Rusty <attackpoo...@...> wrote:
> I just found this post by Ed Burnette on ZDNet that does a great job
> of summarizing the different open source licenses. Its an easy read
> for anyone trying to get their head around the main differences
> between each..
> http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=131

Unfortunately mr burdette is an admitted GPL antagonist. And his
article is very simplistic. If you want to do some serious research in
this area it's best to start with the GPL FAQ (mentioned in the
discussion paper).

I found the following articles very interesting:

The best GNU GPL vs BSD comparison ever (nice and short)
http://opendevice.blogspot.com/2007/06/best-gnu-gpl-vs-bsd-comparison-ever.html

Dual License model: Future of open source?
http://useopensource.blogspot.com/2008/01/dual-license-model-future-of-open.html

GPL vs BSD, a matter of sustainability
http://www.matusiak.eu/numerodix/blog/index.php/2007/12/15/gpl-vs-bsd-a-matter-of-sustainability/

Enjoy!

-- geoff
http://www.daemon.com.au/

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[Matthew Williams-4]

I'm curious about the cost for a commercial license.  Have ya'll worked
out a basic pricing model yet?  It matters less to me, as I said before,
if I put together a really sweet plugin I have no problems releasing it
to the community.  However, most of the plugins I've done don't really
translate to those outside the organization that I've done the
customization for.

As an example, I've take the blog plugin and tweaked out the
posts/comments objects to be notes/comments for communications about a
patient.  However it still looks and acts mostly like a blog.  But if
you take it out of context of the site and webtop, I'm not sure it would
really be any more beneficial to the community than the original blog
plugin.  Now, if they'd wanted to move in the direction of making the
blog plugin behave like a bulletin board (which I'd love to do if I had
more free time), then I'd release that back in a heart beat.

And maybe that's the problem as to others releasing their source?  Would
it be better to have to wade through a slew of modules that meet a
specific organizational need, or have modules that are more generic that
can be used as a drop in part of the installation?


Matthew Williams
Geodesic GraFX
www.geodesicgrafx.com/blog

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[Chris Kent-2]

If I read the previous comments correctly the potential move to GPL is
driven from two main factors, extJS licence and lack of community
involvement.

From what I read, the extJS GPL licence may well be the overall
deciding factor.

Regarding the community involvement and I am as guilty as most but not
all, in not creating and making plug-ins/modifications available. I do
find that most of my modifications are to extend standard Farcry
content types, use them as a base for new ones or to be such a unique
requirement for a particular site that I have thought it is worth
making them available for others. I am working on a different version
of the site tree admin, but this is a part time task as it is not a
firm client requirement yet. But when complete I will make this
available.

I am still confused by what is and is not covered by the proposed GPL
licence. Is it the content of plugins, webskin, packages (including
type and rules etc.). Some modifications are based on other third
party software that could not be made public.

Also on a server with multiple Farcry sites running, some V3 and some
V4, I would probably have to hold back from upgrading to V5 unless I
can get any existing clients using V4 to agree to the licence change
to GPL as these existing sites cannot be run on the same server as a
V5 site unless I have to go for the webroot installation method.

I am not against the licence change, as there is still the choice of
GPL or Commercial licences, but until we know more about potential
costs of commercial developer licences it is difficult to know what
impact the commercial licence would have.

Is there an option for Daemon to offer a Commercial Developer Licence
in exchange for that developers community contribution? Just thought
that this might encourage the developers who are more likely to fall
into the distribution of code issue are also more likely to have more
code to offer. This way a smaller selected set of modules are released
to the community instead of releasing everything whether it is useful
to the community or not.

Chris.

On May 7, 10:52 am, modius <mod...@...> wrote:

> Folks,
>
> There has been much debate here at Daemon regarding a change in
> licensing for FarCry.  As a consequence I've put together a discussion
> document in an effort to explain what we are thinking and get some
> feedback from the community before we do anything.
>
> "The FarCry 5.0 release has been delayed. We're contemplating a
> significant licensing change and as a consequence we want to make the
> decision prior to making the release. Once we have resolved whether or
> not the license change is right for our community, we'll either
> release 5.0 under the current license, Common Public License 1.0
> (CPL), or under the newly proposed dual-licensing scheme."
>
> http://blog.daemon.com.au/go/blog-post/farcry-license-changes
>
> Please feel free to post here, comment on the blog or contact me
> directly with any words of support, condemnation or enquiry!
>
> Best regards,
>
> -- geoffhttp://www.daemon.com.au/

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[Kay Smoljak]

Hi Geoff,

On May 7, 5:52 pm, modius <mod...@...> wrote:
> There has been much debate here at Daemon regarding a change in
> licensing for FarCry.  As a consequence I've put together a discussion
> document in an effort to explain what we are thinking and get some
> feedback from the community before we do anything.

Couple of things:

a) Licensing discussions bore me to tears, nearly as badly as
political discussions. It was a struggle to even skim through this
thread. I have no doubt I've missed stuff.

b) Your blog post was very understandable once I made myself read it -
thanks for your brevity and Plain Aussie English.

c) I think that the dual licensing idea being proposed is very
reasonable. You share your mods nicely with others and if you don't
want to share, you have to pay for a locker to hide your stuff in.

d) The only question I have relates to your comment that license fees
would be "competitive". This is the grey area because I'm not sure who
you're competing with. If we're talking a license fee of $500, that to
me is not unreasonable. If the license fee was closer to $5000, then
that's possibly not a problem for some of the kind of clients who want
or need to keep their modifications to themselves. If the license fee
was more like $50,000, then we're talking a different story entirely.
Without even a ballpark it's hard to put the discussion in context.

So can you at least give us an idea of who FarCry is competing with?

Cheers,
K.

--
Kay Smoljak
http://kay.smoljak.com/
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[modius]

On May 14, 8:05 pm, Chris Kent <mxdes...@...> wrote:
> If I read the previous comments correctly the potential move to GPL is
> driven from two main factors, extJS licence and lack of community
> involvement.
>
> From what I read, the extJS GPL licence may well be the overall
> deciding factor.

Well the extJS licensing changes and their reasons for doing so made
us look hard at our current circumstances.  The outcome of extJS's
exception clauses is unlikely to affect our decision either way.

> I am still confused by what is and is not covered by the proposed GPL
> licence. Is it the content of plugins, webskin, packages (including
> type and rules etc.). Some modifications are based on other third
> party software that could not be made public.

Basically we will not distribute anything that does not comply with
the distribution requirements of GPL -- that's pretty easy.

Unless we introduce an exception to the license, everything you build
on top of FarCry GPL would also be distributed under GPL.  If we go
ahead we would more than likely introduce an exception clearly
excluding anything to do with a graphic theme for a website.

If you have requirements that prohibit distribution under the terms of
the GPL, you would be able to purchase a Commercial License.

> Also on a server with multiple Farcry sites running, some V3 and some
> V4, I would probably have to hold back from upgrading to V5 unless I
> can get any existing clients using V4 to agree to the licence change
> to GPL as these existing sites cannot be run on the same server as a
> V5 site unless I have to go for the webroot installation method.

Running different version of FarCry within the one CF instance is
problematic -- but obviously nothing to do with the license.

It's likely that most clients in a shared hosting environment would be
unaffected by the introduction of GPL.  Are they really wanting to
distribute their changes?  Would anyone want to see them if they did?

> I am not against the licence change, as there is still the choice of
> GPL or Commercial licences, but until we know more about potential
> costs of commercial developer licences it is difficult to know what
> impact the commercial licence would have.

Our experience is that few people have actually read the CPL.  In all
likelihood a change to GPL will have little or no impact.  The
Commercial License is relevant for people who have closed-source code
they must protect (or at least feel they must), and/or people who want
to support the FarCry development team through the purchase of a
license.

We are discussing potential pricing and model for the license (eg. per
server, per domain, whatever) with potential partners.  If anyone is
interested in being a partner then please contact me directly.

> Is there an option for Daemon to offer a Commercial Developer Licence
> in exchange for that developers community contribution? Just thought
> that this might encourage the developers who are more likely to fall
> into the distribution of code issue are also more likely to have more
> code to offer. This way a smaller selected set of modules are released
> to the community instead of releasing everything whether it is useful
> to the community or not.

As far as we can see there is no need for such a license.

The only reason a developer license would be necessary is for the
potential development of "commercial" plugins by third-parties.  This
is something we are investigating -- however, I would note that
currently under the CPL there are no readily available commercial
plugins except Daemon's.

-- geoff
http://www.daemon.com.au/
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[modius]

On May 14, 10:36 pm, Kay  Smoljak <kay.smol...@...> wrote:

> d) The only question I have relates to your comment that license fees
> would be "competitive". This is the grey area because I'm not sure who
> you're competing with. If we're talking a license fee of $500, that to
> me is not unreasonable. If the license fee was closer to $5000, then
> that's possibly not a problem for some of the kind of clients who want
> or need to keep their modifications to themselves. If the license fee
> was more like $50,000, then we're talking a different story entirely.
> Without even a ballpark it's hard to put the discussion in context.
>
> So can you at least give us an idea of who FarCry is competing with?

We're discussing pricing, and what a license covers -- for example, is
it per server, per domain?  How do you handle virtuals? And so on.
We've got a very simple model we hope will appeal to people.  If
anyone would like to apply to be a partner, potentially offering
FarCry for resale and so on, please contact me directly.

Obviously its a difficult thing to talk pricing without a definition
of exactly what the license covers.  However, we are looking at
numbers closer to $5,000USD rather than $500 or $50,000.  Apologies
for being vague at this stage -- we will release details on licensing
once we've had a chance to get feedback from prospective partners in
the community.

Best regards,

-- geoff
http://www.daemon.com.au/


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[Kay Smoljak]

Thanks Geoff,

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 3:14 PM, modius <modius@...> wrote:
>  However, we are looking at numbers closer to $5,000USD rather than $500 or $50,000.

That clears it up sufficiently for me - at any rate, it would be
highly unlikely that any of my clients would be requiring a commerial
license anyway (I'm sure the same would apply to most developers
providing FarCry-based solutions). You're obviously not considering
this step without really investigating all the possibilities, and I
for one trust your judgement - the FarCry team has not led us astray
thus far :)

Cheers,
K.

--
Kay Smoljak
business: www.cleverstarfish.com
coldfusion: kay.smoljak.com
personal: goatlady.wordpress.com | heapsbad.com

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[modius]

On May 7, 7:52 pm, modius <mod...@...> wrote:

> There has been much debate here at Daemon regarding a change in
> licensing for FarCry.  As a consequence I've put together a discussion
> document in an effort to explain what we are thinking and get some
> feedback from the community before we do anything.
>
> "The FarCry 5.0 release has been delayed. We're contemplating a
> significant licensing change and as a consequence we want to make the
> decision prior to making the release. Once we have resolved whether or
> not the license change is right for our community, we'll either
> release 5.0 under the current license, Common Public License 1.0
> (CPL), or under the newly proposed dual-licensing scheme."
>
> http://blog.daemon.com.au/go/blog-post/farcry-license-changes

After much deliberation, and little or no objection from the community
at large, we have decided to license the open source code base under
the GPL v3 from v5.0.  We will continue to maintain earlier versions
of the code base under CPL 1.0 for the foreseeable future.

We'll be releasing the 5.0 milestone, just as soon as we implement the
relevant license changes and clean up those issues that have dropped
into bug database during the discussion period.  If we can get this
done by the end of the week we'll release straight away, failing that
the week after the webDU conference.

Thanks for your feedback and ongoing support.

-- geoff
http://www.daemon.com.au/

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