Hi all, I fear this discussion will quickly devolve into a recursive flame- fest, but it needs to be broached, so here we go. Note that I kind of think this is more of dev topic than users, but I want to make sure everyone knows the conversation is happening and can easily participate. This is also likely to be the first of a series of conversations I'll be starting to try to paper over the lack of organization and process we've had in the past.
First, I want to be clear that this is me seeking your input - we haven't decided on anything, and I'm starting this thread so we have the necessary data to make a decision. We have to be conscious that Reductive Labs is a commercial company, though. My development of Puppet and the money I make around it feeds my family and keeps us housed, allowing me to focus on it full time. I think our focus on building community stands on its own, but the contributor list is an equally clear indication that being paid to work on Puppet results in a lot more work being done on Puppet - of the top ten Puppet contributors (http://www.ohloh.net/p/puppet/contributors ), 5 have been paid by their companies to do the work, and 4 have been paid specifically by Reductive Labs (me, Andrew, Rick, and Ben/ajax). One of my goals in this discussion is to figure out the best way to pay more people to work on Puppet, by having enough money to hire them. (Incidentally, I should be posting a job description for a full- time programmer at Reductive Labs this week.) Finally, if you have concerns about this topic that you don't feel comfortable voicing publicly, feel free to contact me directly. So: We've never done a very good job of having much of a licensing or copyright strategy for Puppet and the tools around it. While all of the projects have a license, there's no documentation on how to maintain the license (e.g., whether every file should have a license header), and there's a bit of confusion around the license itself since Puppet's current license file says 'GPL2 or later'. As to copyright, we're *pretty* good at maintaining that, especially since we switched to Git, since everyone who commits has their email address recorded with the commit, but we don't have an official project policy published anywhere one way or another, and we just haven't been tracking copyright. For both the project and my company, I think we need to develop complete policies around these two topics, and then spend time actually maintaining them. Given that we have a license but no policies or history around it, I think it's worth revisiting the basics, and assessing what's best for the project. I expect that Reductive Labs would fund any work that needs to be done to enact these policies, but as always, I'll do what I can to encourage community involvement. I think there are essentially two decisions to make, with some details around them: 1) Should we use a completely open Apache-style license, or a reciprocal/viral GPL-style license? 2) Should we require copyright assignment of any kind? Going with those questions, we have two priorities: 1) Maximize ability to grow and sustain a community 2) Enable Reductive Labs to increase its funding of development This second point is important to be obvious about - like Pixar (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/business/media/06pixar.html ), we make money so we can write software, and Puppet clearly needs more development time than we're spending on it right now. There are further tools beyond Puppet that we also want to create, but we need enough developer manpower to be able to do so. I expect this point to be the biggest source of contention, so all I can really say is, Reductive Labs isn't suddenly morphing into an anti- community commercial vendor who uses open source for marketing but doesn't actually believe in it. I'm asking *you*, right now, how we can tune our licensing and copyright policy to best meet your needs. If that doesn't satisfy you, I'll be glad to fly out and discuss it with you for $5,000 USD per day. :) Really, though, one of my other goals here is to be more transparent about how Reductive Labs hopes to make money and continue funding development. Many people in the community are curious on this front for many reasons, and I think it's important it be clear. Here is some reading on this subject, to kind of set the context: http://madstop.com/2009/02/28/the-most-freetm-way-to-make-money-from-open-source/ (This article came out much more in favor than Open Core than it was supposed to; the article was supposed to be a question, rather than an answer.) http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2009/03/24/transparency-the-first-step-towards-open-source-participation-for-proprietary-vendors/ http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2009/04/06/on-the-importance-of-copyright-assignment/ http://www.knowledgetree.com/blog/company-driven-open-source-communities-copyright-assignment Fundamentally, I see three basic choices: 1) Leave them like they are. No copyright assignment, no real copyright maintenance, GPL2 or later. This means that every contributor ever must give permission for things like license changes, we can't easily protect against license infringement (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html ), no one can ever dual license, and essentially no commercial software can ever be produced that integrates with Puppet. 2) Stick to a viral/reciprocal license (probably AGPLv3) but require Sun-style copyright contribution (which provides the project a non- exclusive license to the copyright). This provides a single organization with a license for all copyright, and allows that license holder (Reductive Labs) to protect against license infringement, provide patent indemnity (which I've already been asked about by others but cannot currently offer), relicense Puppet (and produce commercial software that integrates with that relicensed product), and probably more. 3) Switch to a non-reciprocal license (e.g., Apache) and don't require copyright coassignment. This allows anyone to do anything with the code, so there's no real concern about license infringement and anyone can make commercial add-ons. This is both good and bad, though, in that even those with no commitment to Puppet's community could build commercial products on it, which I think is not so great. After spending the last month thinking about it, and talking with many people (e.g., Tarus Balog, Matt Asay, Marten Mickos, Mark Radcliffe, and many more), I think #2 is the best option. It provides the best combination of openness for the community and opportunity for Reductive Labs. It hurts to say this, because I've always thought copyright assignment was evil, but I've been convinced otherwise, mostly by the links above and conversation with Tarus of OpenNMS. The problem I have with #1 is that is explicitly limits Puppet's ability to integrate with other commercial software, which I think is unfortunate and makes it hard to build Puppet into an ecosystem, rather than just being a stand-alone tool. The problem I have with #3 is that I have a hard time seeing how Reductive Labs can add more programmers to the project with it. What do you think? -- It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. -- David Brin --------------------------------------------------------------------- Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Users" group. 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