Although it is nice to hear that SA is becoming that successful - even global players like NAI are getting interested in it -, the acquisition of Deersoft by NAI will change - and has already changed - the community project which SA is.
SA is licensed under the same terms as Perl itself, this means a dual GPL / Artistic license. The Artistic license permits to keep modifications to the licensed code proprietary. As stated in [1], Network Associates is strongly devoted to the "commercial software model" and "prefers to work with proprietary source code". It's a great pity that NAI will now profit from the GA, the rulebase, the eval rules and the formidable Bayes filter without giving back anything to the project - if I understand the NAI statements correctly. It's a pity that competent developers have to leave the project because of this. It's a pity that one can't do anything to it, because what happens is in full accordance with the license terms. A possible solution to avoid something like this happening to future SA code again is to change the license terms of SA. The LGPL, for example, would be a much better choice in my opinion. The LGPL would still permit commercial users, such as MessageLabs and also NAI, to use the SA modules in their proprietary software. It would, however, force them to contribute all the changes, improvements and bugfixes back to the community project. This would of course apply only to code which is written in future (not the current codebase). Any thoughts on this? tobias (just had to write this down last night. I don't know whether it's my business to propose something like this [probably not], but I hate writing something and then throwing it away for nothing) [1]: http://www.mcafeeb2b.com/other/jump/deersoft-faq.asp ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See! http://www.vasoftware.com _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
