decided they should be paid for their work. There is one slight problem however. Growl is Open Source Software.
So? You can sell open source software. Just because software is GPL/BSD licenced doesn't mean you can't sell it. Open Source ≠ Non-commerical. Closed Source ≠ Commmerical. You can change for open source software. If something is open source you can't complain if someone sells it.
Obviously if the software is open source, everyone who buys a copy is allowed to sell the software themselves and they don't have to give the original author any money. They also cannot stop someone taking an older version of the code and distributing it.
If something is open source you can't complain if someone sells it. Obviously if the software is open source, everyone who buys a copy is allowed to sell the software themselves and they don't have to give the original author any money. They also cannot stop someone taking an older version of the code and distributing it.
What? I really don't get why so many people don't understand that "Open Source" does not mean you can't sell it, nor does it mean you can sell it at will or whatever. It just means you can view the source. The term "Open Source" does not make any claims about monetization, it does not even say which kind of license is at play.
You can publish your code open source, charge for it and still forbid people to sell it or even redistribute the source.
"Open Source" is not a license. GPL, BSD, MIT, Apache etc. are all open source licenses with very different rules.
Here's a list of licenses many people consider "open source licenses": http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical
Conversely, you can have closed source applications which allow you to redistribute them or even sell at will.
Closed source software is just more likely to have a license which is very strict about redistribution, that's all.
"Open Source" [...] just means you can view the source.
No. See, for example, the Open Source Definition [1] by the Open Source Initiative [2] which opens with the statement "Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code." Wikipedia states that their "definition is widely recognized as the standard or de facto definition." [3]
You can publish your code open source, charge for it and still forbid people to sell it or even redistribute the source.
Again, no. The Open Source Definition states that "The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software" and "The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form."
Note that the term "Open Source" isn't trademarked [3] (YMMV), so you can call pretty much anything you want Open Source (IANAL), but that doesn't mean that anyone else would be likely to agree with you. In much the same way, I can point at the small wooden giraffe on my bookcase and call it a delicious slice of blueberry cheesecake, but you probably wouldn't agree with me and it is unlikely to taste good.
Microsoft once wanted to achieve something similar to what you wrote. But even ten years ago they recognised that their goal wouldn't be recognised as "open source", and so they called their program "shared source." [4]
"Open Source" is not a license. GPL, BSD, MIT, Apache etc. are all open source licenses with very different rules.
This is true as far as it goes (although the use of "very" is certainly arguable), and it is even worth remarking that open source licenses are often mutually-incompatible. However open source licenses all have certain features in common [1], and when talking about these commonalities, it is not unreasonable to use the phrase "open source license" rather than writing "GPL, BSD, MIT, Apache etc." each and every time.
So maybe I was wrong but I dealt with open source earlier than the OSI came up with the definition. What they call "Open Source" is more "Free (as in freedom, libre) Software" to me.
I guess my definition is outdated but I still feel "Open Source" should just mean, well... open source :)
What's the difference between "Free Software" and "Open Source" as coined by OSI?
The FSF are even stronger than the OSI on the point that people must also have the freedom to charge for the software if they want:
Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project
is that you should not charge money for distributing
copies of software, or that you should charge as little
as possible — just enough to cover the cost. This is a
misunderstanding. Actually, we encourage people who
redistribute free software to charge as much as they
wish or can.
He's right for values of "open source" defined by the OSI.
However, you need to do more than they have done if you want to clearly and unambiguously define a phrase, especially one that has legal and commercial implications. You need to make everyone in the world agree on the definition and refrain from using it in any other way. That hasn't happened yet, except perhaps for those within the industry.
As Richard Stallman says:
"However, the obvious meaning for the expression “open source software”—and the one most people seem to think it means—is “You can look at the source code.” That criterion is much weaker than the free software definition, much weaker also than the official definition of open source. It includes many programs that are neither free nor open source."
"The term “open source” has been further stretched by its application to other activities, such as government, education, and science, where there is no such thing as source code, and where criteria for software licensing are simply not pertinent. The only thing these activities have in common is that they somehow invite people to participate. They stretch the term so far that it only means “participatory”."
Actually, free software as defined by the FSF is any software licensed such that you can use it, modify the source, redistribute it, and redistribute changed copies of it.
There isn't one. The only difference is who's ego you stroke ESR(Open Source), or RMS(Free Software).
From the history of the OSI:
The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape.
You can publish your code open source, charge for it and still forbid people to sell it or even redistribute the source.
Not really. It depends on the exact licence but just about every 'open source' licence, and the Open Source Definition from the OSI and the Free Software Defintion from the FSF will requite that the licence lets the people who get the software to be allowed to redistribute it.
Just look at the link you provided for 'open source definition': "Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:", and №1 being: "The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale."
The OSI was founded in 1998, but companies such as SAP provided their ERP systems with full readable source code much earlier than that, and it was called "open source" (as opposed to "closed source" which was more common with COTS).
However, it is explicitly forbidden in the licence to re-sell it or re-distribute it.
The term pre-dates the organisation's re-definition of it for their own purposes.
Yes, and "gay" used to mean a different thing. Nowadays the only widespread definition of Open Source is the one defined by the OSI. Using it to mean something else is deceptive.
I disagree. Is SAP deceptive just because one popular organization prefers another definition of open source? The OSI did not invent the term "open source". The term "open source" itself should not imply a specific license.
Is SAP deceptive just because one popular organization prefers another definition of open source?
It's not because the OSI prefers, it's because it's the mainstream, generally accepted current definition of the word. I mean, if I sold you a "broascasting system", would you accept something that casts seeds out?
The term "open source" itself should not imply a specific license
It doesn't. It implies a set of conditions they have to meet. BSD, MIT, GPL, Apache, WTFPL, are all different Open Source licenses.
Actually, Eric S Raymond, one of the founders of OSI, was also one of the people credited with coining the term "open source" at a meeting discussing Netscape releasing source code.
You may consider it deceptive, but it was and remains a common business practice for at least one very large software company. I just thought I'd point that it is possible to publish your code open source (not Open Source) and write your own licence conditions, and it happens every day, not just in the past.
Sure, but they also have different meanings in different contexts, and you need to be aware of them. I can still hold a tea party for my young daughter, right? Or has that phrase been taken for ever?
There's a difference between a word gaining a second meaning, and one meaning effectively replacing the other completely.
icebraining mentioned "gay". Today, who in their right mind would call a joyful person gay? That's what the term originally meant, but has since has been completely replaced with meaning "homosexual".
The term "Open Source" is the same. It may have meant something different some one and a half decades back. That meaning, however, has completely fallen out of use. Just as "gay" meaning "joyful" has. It's deceptive to use it that way.
"That meaning, however, has completely fallen out of use."
I'm not convinced of that - in fact, I think that is a little naive.
I don't believe that the OSI definition is completely accepted by the uneducated population at large, and don't believe that the term "open source" is not used by various software companies in ways that mislead and obfuscate the OSI meaning.
I'll quote Mr Stallman:
"However, the obvious meaning for the expression “open source software”—and the one most people seem to think it means—is “You can look at the source code.” That criterion is much weaker than the free software definition, much weaker also than the official definition of open source. It includes many programs that are neither free nor open source."
"The term “open source” has been further stretched by its application to other activities, such as government, education, and science, where there is no such thing as source code, and where criteria for software licensing are simply not pertinent. The only thing these activities have in common is that they somehow invite people to participate. They stretch the term so far that it only means “participatory”."
I don't accept that the other meanings have completely fallen out of use.
- If you are given the binaries, you are also given the source.
- You may modify the source to your liking.
- You may distribute the source or a compiled version of it at will.
Note it says nothing about licensing of mods and even the distribution. Each license is actually tackling how modifications and dependencies are treated.
Nothing in the philosophy says you cannot sell it. At all. Nor in any os license.
Remember the first analogy Stalman says: Free software: "Think Free as in Free Speech, not Free as in Free Beer."
It doesn't matter what the philosophy is, it matters what the laws says and what it allows you to do. Many companies don't want you to resell their products on ebay (their philosophy). However, the first sale doctrine says something different (the law).
So while you may not like someone re-packaging and re-selling open source software, as long as they are following the license, there isn't much you can do about it.
Your main point is true, but I'd like to point out that copyright circumvents the first-sale doctrine. You're not allowed to copy and distribute works that you own, if you don't have a copyright license for the material.
"You can publish your code open source, charge for it and still forbid people to sell it or even redistribute the source." - Microsoft tried to call such a strategy open source; this was widely rejected and the approach was called "source under glass".
Disregarding all the banter about what "open source" means -there are separate issues at hand.
One is the actual license terms the older versions were distributed under. Those matter.
Another is how the project itself was run, specifically how copyright assignment worked. If contributors were required to assign copyright to the project maintainer (or whatever) in order to commit to his main branch, as is the case with many projects, then he can likely do whatever he wants in terms of re-licensing. If that wasn't addressed clearly, there might be wiggle room for closing it off - contributors may have some kind of copyright claim if their work was taken and used under terms they didn't agree to.
Another is PR - that one is obvious.
As for the "Open source means you give back" - let's get over it - that's not what it was originally about - you have no "duty" to contribute - it's just a fantastic, common side effect that lots of people like to take advantage of.
End of story - if you are contributing code to someone elses project, be sure you understand where you sit in terms of copyright.
To my knowledge, the source to the 1.3.x release isn't public. I wonder whether it's a complete rewrite from scratch or whether 1.3.x still contains patches from external contributors and whether they agreed that their work be sold for money.
Your knowledge is incorrect. The 1.3.0 source is available[0], and 1.3.1 should be soon[1], they have not dumped them in the public repository is all.
> I wonder whether it's a complete rewrite from scratch or whether 1.3.x still contains patches from external contributors and whether they agreed that their work be sold for money.
I'm not sure that has any relevance. It would if Growl had changed its license (they have to agree to license changes to their contributions, unless they ceded their copyright to the project or project owner), but selling the product is independent of that. It can be seen as a dick move, but it's still independent.
BSD is irrelevant here. If it was a GPLv3 licenced work it could still be sold. The agreeded to their work begin sellable when they contributed to an open source project.
That is correct. The only difference a GPL license would make is that Growl would be forced to release the source code for any version that they sell. And that they wouldn't be able to sell it through the App Store.
As is so often the case with these sorts of posts, there are several issues being conflated here:
1. Growl authors want to ca$h in
2. Widely reported issues under Lion
3. Legitimate conjecture over rights and ethics for pmetzger's fork and whether it can be called Growl
I'd be more than happy to donate (more) to Growl, although I admit that the "suggested upgrade" made me pause. It felt like it crossed that slim line between a premium version and bait-and-switch that is hard to argue either way. It's certainly not strange that people are responding to the fact that this was just dropped on the existing userbase. That pmetzger is getting C+Ds (has this been confirmed) makes me really uncomfortable — it's not in the spirit of OSS as I understand it in my gut.
Ultimately, I don't think people will have a problem with paying, and certainly not such a small amount. It's more the way that it's been thrust upon us that feels slightly off. Am I right?
Of course, we haven't heard their side of the story yet. I urge you all to wait before you cast aspersions on them, because they've worked hard on something many of us have used for years.
>Ultimately, I don't think people will have a problem with paying, and certainly not such a small amount.
Growl use seems to be integrated in several open source projects. I probably would never have gone out of my way to get it -- but, a couple of apps I did want suggested installing growl, and it works quite nicely. (I think Adium is what finally prompted me to install it.)
If for no other reason a fork will appear if growl is not freely available, because a lot of open source projects use it under the assumption that it is available.
3. It's like the Mozilla Firefox vs Debian Iceweasel controversy. Or Redhat vs Centos. The code is open, but the trademarks are copyrighted. If Growl is a trademark and the brand artwork is non-free, then forks can't use it without permission.
I kind of respect the choice of Mozilla and Redhat to defend their trademarks because it's partly an issue of quality control and reputation. But I do prefer projects that put branding under a creative commons license. It's closer to the spirit of free software. I suggest the forked Growl choose a new name and put the branding under a free license.
Personally I don't see what people are complaining about here. He took an open source project, with a licence that permitted it, and made it a commercial project by adding chances and forming a derivative work. There is no foul play here.
If someone else wants to fork the project and try and mimic the new commercial features they're free to do so. Don't expect the original developers to help you though. They're already set on their own path.
It became popular because it was open source and the community built the brand recognition. Now he went and took the brand recognition to do something that the community didn't expect and doesn't approve of.
If you use the latest BSD released version then you're ok. The code is free for public use. Were you to make it commercial though I think you would be liable as you would need the explicit permission of the original owner to do so.
EDIT: It seems after further research the license that was being used prohibits the name "Growl" being used to promote any derivative works of the same name without explicit permission from the original owners.
[1] - http://growl.info/documentation/developer/bsd-license.txt
Were you to make it commercial though I think you would be liable as you would need the explicit permission of the original owner to do so.
Just about every open source licence, include the BSD released code, explictly gives you the permission to sell the software. If the original author released Growl 10 years under an open source licence then they gave you the permission to sell it commerically then.
The name is complicated and usually falls under trademark law, and hence you probably could be sued for claiming that your fork is "Growl" when the average person thinks that only $ORIGINAL_AUTHOR can release "Growl".
From the article:
"One of the biggest problems with this approach, other than the fact they just pissed off a lot of people who beleive strongly in OSS, is that Growl is still broken. So you pay your $1.99 and it no workie. <samuel:jackson>TESTING MOTHER FUCKERS, DO YOU DO IT?</samuel:jackson>"
I happily paid for Growl from the App store, and sure enough it works fine on both my Lion Macs.
The 1.3 SDK also added Mist[0], which means software does not have to install Growl itself (and the user does not need Growl) to get Growl notifications.
The Growl application itself (from the AppStore) essentially becomes a "Growl Pro", offering users more (and centralized) control over notifications display.
The OSS community has always had an uneasy tension between a) for-profit enterprise which provides most of the man-power and b) anti-commercial poor adolescents of all ages who simultaneously think that contributing to OSS is a moral obligation and that the license and copyright assignment they fetishize includes a "All contributors will be made happy despite their total lack of business sense" clause, somewhere.
Many core Python contributors including Guido are employed by companies like Google to work on it.
Mozilla is, technically, an exception: almost everyone is employed by the Mozilla corporation, a non-profit by virtue of its lucrative search deal with Google. Few projects have that luxury.
Something like 40% of Mozilla code is written by community contributors, which is quite remarkable. How many of those non-employees are paid by someone else specifically to work on Mozilla I don't know. i.e. I don't know if IBM pays people to work on Firefox they way they pay people to work on Linux.
1) To work full time on something like Linux, it really requires an external employer. So it isn't surprising that this is the case. To get involved does not, and certainly for a long time independent developers were as important as corporations there.
2) Everyone economically owns the output. I don't mean the copyrights. I mean everyone has a right to put the software to use for whatever purposes they want, whether in manufacturing, say, server appliances, or just running a web site (or even on my wife's laptop).
If the big companies stopped contributing to Linux tomorrow, would Linux die? I doubt it. So I suppose it depends on what you mean by "dependent." Certainly Linux is not dependent on corporate coding the way, say, Windows is.....
Yes, they do. Who do you think contributes to the Linux kernel everyday, only individual hackers all over the world pushing FL/OSS ? The vast majority of the contributors are big-tech-co affiliated who come from places like Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Novell, Oracle, AMD, Google, and more. Individuals and those not wishing to state their affiliation/place-of-work are only about 18% of the contributors to Linux.
Btw, this is part of the issue some people have with Ubuntu, in that it makes no contributions upstream to the kernel like Red Hat, Novell and others do. A Red Hat Greg DeKoenigsberg even said on OSNews once that "Canonical is a marketing organization masquerading as an engineering organization."[1]
Python's father Guido van Rossum and other core contributor are employed by Google and other big tech companies to work on Python.
Mozilla is mostly by Mozilla people, however it's basically alive because of the funding and ad deals it has with Google. Without that, it couldn't continue.
Drama. He only got a one month ban. The mailing list is not community owned so when subscribers do things that the owners don't like they're free to do whatever they want. Fork the mailing list.
It strikes me that if Growl were to disappear, there would be a chorus of users chiming in that they'd "happily pay for the software" as we usually see with popular free utilities that disappear. Here we have someone who finally decided they wanted to profit from their effort, and we see the flip side. A definitive lose-lose situation.
If you listen to the interview, Metzger actually seemed happy that there would be a paid version, thinking it meant that it would be maintained. Instead, the paid version didn't work for him and fixes didn't seem forthcoming. So he rolled his own and contributed. I'm not saying that your scenario wouldn't happen, but it doesn't apply in Metzger's case.
How? An open source project goes commercial and someone forks it to keep an open source derivative going. The system works. I don't see how this is a lose-lose. If the Growl dev loses users then it just goes to show that it's not worth paying for. I won't offer my opinion on whether it's worth $2, especially at this point in the project lifecycle, but you might be able to guess it.
I'm speaking from the perspective of community response. If the developer grows tired of maintaining the application and decides to abandon it, the community reacts negatively. If the developer grows tired of maintaining the application, but decides that being paid to do so is sufficient incentive, the community reacts negatively.
That's negative-negative, or lose-lose from a community response perspective.
So? You can sell open source software. Just because software is GPL/BSD licenced doesn't mean you can't sell it. Open Source ≠ Non-commerical. Closed Source ≠ Commmerical. You can change for open source software. If something is open source you can't complain if someone sells it.
Obviously if the software is open source, everyone who buys a copy is allowed to sell the software themselves and they don't have to give the original author any money. They also cannot stop someone taking an older version of the code and distributing it.