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Open Core

Bradley M. Kuhn: judge the freedom of your codebase not only on its license, but also on the diversity of the community that contributes to it.

+1 insightful.  Lots of good stuff in that post.  Copyright assignment is a community smell.

It isn’t surprising that Brad believes that the GPL while retaining copyright is the best way to build a diverse community, my experience is that the Apache License is often more effective at being able to attract from a larger pool of developers.  Either way, we agree that the goal is a diverse community, the license chosen is but one of many factors that may help you get there.

Brad’s observations also apply to standards, politics, and pretty much any context where any group of people are treated as “more equal” than an other group.

I’ll agree that Apache, BSD, MIT and similar licenses are more likely to attract a diverse community.  I personally will contribute to a GPL library only if its indisputably the best of its type, and even then I’m unlikely to do much more than a patch or two, due to my reluctance.  I’m totally OK if it’s a GPL stand-alone application, but I’m not a fan of GPL libraries and frameworks.  Copyright assignment seems kind of dumb for individual projects, because most open-source developers either don’t make any money from them or make money from them with some other application that uses the open-source stuff they’ve built.  In both those cases, there’s rarely a need to get sign-off from all contributors of your project for something, and I get the impression that that’s the big issue that copyright assignment is meant to solve.

Posted by Bob Aman at

mlinksva: "open core" suspect beyond software http://intertwingly.net/blog/2009/10/18/Open-Core btw I think ©assignment even to nonprofit is lame

mlinksva’s status on Sunday, 18-Oct-09 17:22:29 UTC...

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