-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Luke Kanies wrote: > 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.)
So I'll put my ten cents in as the remaining member of the ten. To be clear I am completely unpaid for my work on the project by my employer or Reductive Labs. Though Luke does buy drinks sometimes. Excuse any rambling I am typing this whilst on holidays in Thailand on the end of some shaky connections. *big snips* > 1) Should we use a completely open Apache-style license, or a > reciprocal/viral GPL-style license? I have concerns over the use of the word 'viral' as a value judgement but okay... > 2) Should we require copyright assignment of any kind? Fundamentally think that's a good summary. > 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 It should be clear here that under certain models these could be mutually exclusive. > 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. :) I have no issues with you needing to eat and to be honest I've always thought you were way too generous with your time on "non-core" activities and especially to people who a) lack manners and b) treat the community as if they were paying support. > 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. I have no issues with a GPLv2/3 style license but I appreciate the reasons why it might not work. > 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. I have no issues with an AGPLv3 license but obviously see issues with 1. I personally probably wouldn't be able to contribute to the community in this instance. It would be quite difficult for me professionally to sign a Sun-style SCA/copyright contribution license. > 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. This is my preference but again understand the challenges. I do wonder how many people would be potentially building commercial products from Puppet currently - though I can understand the potential future threat. > What do you think? I find myself in broad agreement with David Lutterkort on most of the issues in this discussion. Though, personally, I don't much care which license is used - LGPL seems to be attractive, (A)GPLv3, even BSDv2 - all of which suit me fine to varying degrees of "fine". Dual licenses also seem a reasonable approach to me (though all these models all require copyright assignment of some kind - see below). The copyright assignment I find myself conflicted about. I think there would need to be a compelling commercial reason to do this. I obviously want to see Reductive and Puppet flourish - and if this requires that an SCA/copyright assignment of some kind takes place then so be it. I think it'd limit the potential contributions to the community - including mine. I also think a lot of casual bug/patch submitters won't bother if they have to sign an agreement - especially if, like me, it requires dealing with corporate legal people. I suspect that some of the "paid" corporate contributors are also going to have issues with this. Regards James Turnbull - -- Author of: * Pro Linux Systems Administration (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1430219122/) * Pulling Strings with Puppet (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590599780/) * Pro Nagios 2.0 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590596099/) * Hardening Linux (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590594444/) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFJ2sIj9hTGvAxC30ARAnfiAJ9sPzevOWO6L4uJL+fya46JYWLI2wCeLv8P AKnvxtnqVeTDrFt8kPDcsdw= =Jlmd -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Users" group. 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