Posted by
YoavShapira on
Dec 08, 2005; 2:29pm
URL: http://ofbiz.116.s1.nabble.com/Users-Apache-what-tp136666p136667.html
Howdy,
> I just had to chime in on this. I respect Si Chen greatly as well as the
> rest of the OFBiz crew and contributors, but why fix something that is not
> broken. OFBiz has been making astronomical progress and has some very high
> profile users out there and continues along what I think to be a true open
> source path. Why on earth would anyone want to throw the proverbial monkey
> wrench in the works now by switching license structures to the Apache 2.0?
I think the ASF path is just as much "true open source" as what OFBiz
is doing, both from a legal perspective and from a
community-empowerment perspective.
Consider the history of the ASF itself: it was just The Apache Group
with the eight or so original developers for a long time: this is
similar to OFBiz at this point in time. But as the product became
more widely used and as the number of side projects grew (see for
example today's thread asking for an OFBiz "contributions" subtree),
the benefits of forming a Foundation for legal and organizational
purposes outweighed the costs. So a structure was put in place to
easily allow growth, with legal backing, and places to plug in support
services like press releases or licensing advice, for those
projects/people who want it.
Alternatively, one could consider another type of project: look at
Tomcat. It was donated by Sun to the ASF for a number of reasons,
from an organization which already had the funds and setup to do its
own marketing and development without the ASF's help. Two of the
relevant reasons to this discussion were the desire to attract a
broader developer community and to gain mind share. I think both are
true to OFBiz as well: the current crew is awesome, but moving into a
higher visibility sphere would attract more contributors, a good thing
for the product and its community. And it would bring more
high-profile users. It may even let some of the 5 or so current
committers try another project for a few months if they felt like it
;)
> no sense to convert at this point, after all what is there to gain, some
> approval from the ASF?
It's not about ASF approval. Like I said before, besides the few
basics like using the Apache License , no one will try to change how
the current team runs the project. They still decide on technical
standards, when/how to cut releases, what to do when, etc. The same
five or so people who approve stuff now will approve it then.
What there is to gain is the support of a community of experienced
developers, associated services like infrastructure maintenance,
press/PR coordination, legal indemnification, legal advice, the ASF
brand and associated mindshare, and the emergent opportunities for
cross-pollination that arise when good people discuss things.
> Not needed in my opinion, Andy and David have their
> vision and have produced an amazing product and it has propelled OFBiz as
> is just fine.
If you're content with that, I completely understand. It's a fine
point of view. I'm almost always in the "if it ain't broken, don't
fix it" school myself. But if you want to scale bigger, get more
users, grow the team, be more robust to current committers wanting to
leave (or having kids and needing to leave for a little while, etc.),
I think the ASF supports that better than a stand-alone project.
> just look at the companies using it I.E DKNY, ISOTONER etc. the ASF is no
> magic bullet and would more than likely cloud up the waters as to how you
> could sell and distribute the code, hell why were at it why don't we just
> go GPL (not!)
No one is saying the ASF is a magic bullet for anything. It wasn't me
who came up with this idea in the first place ;)
I don't want to get into a licensing debate: I think the facts on the
ground with respect to how people are using, bundling, packaging, and
selling products and services based on Apache-licensed code tell
enough of the story. It's not the GPL, and great care has gone into
not only the design of the license but the enforcement of its usage.
--
Yoav Shapira
System Design and Management Fellow
MIT Sloan School of Management
Cambridge, MA, USA
[hidden email] / www.yoavshapira.com
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