[wplug] GNU GPL License

Patrick Wagstrom patrick at wagstrom.net
Wed Oct 14 22:50:20 EDT 2009


On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 5:02 PM, Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 03:42:52PM -0400, Bruno Pierri Galvao wrote:
> > I am still uncertain on the whole situation. If I have all my code
> > contributions open source then how can I develop a multimillion dollar
> > business when anyone could take the code and set up the exact same
> > business in minutes? Open source sounds nice but is it the best
> > approach for my situation?
>
> If you are that concerned about it, write it yourself and don't use
> any GPL'd code.  It doesn't seem like you're that interested in
> participating in an open source environment, but rather to create a
> multimillion dollar business.  Perhaps when you're rich and famous,
> you can open source the code.


While I agree with your sentiment, everyone is missing one major issue. The
nature of the license.  The GNU GPL allows you to take a piece of GPL and do
whatever the heck you want with it and never provide those changes to anyone
provided you follow one key rule: don't distribute the software.  In the US
distribution generally is considered to be outside of the business -- so as
long as you keep the software in house, you're good.  If the software was
Affero licensed, this would be a different story (and the reason for the
creation of the Affero license).

The bigger issue to consider is that of the community.  The software is
newly released -- which is probably a bad thing.  It doesn't look like it
has much of a community.  It hasn't had a commit to the public repository in
over three weeks. Furthermore there are two other glaring issues: 1) the
developers were stupid and tried to put their own license on the code and 2)
from what I can tell there are basically no comments in the code, no test
harnesses, no plan, no nothing. 3) Their contact address is a hotmail
address.  Seriously, an f'ing hotmail address.

FWIW, here's the license that's actually in the code:

Copyright (c) 2006-2009 Ualink (http://www.phpb2b.com/)
All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of
copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated
conditions are met. This License explicitly affirms your unlimited
permission to run the unmodified Program. The output from running a
covered work is covered by this License only if the output, given its
content, constitutes a covered work. This License acknowledges your
rights of fair use or other equivalent, as provided by copyright law.

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Reading through that license, it doesn't sound like open source to me.  It
sounds like they're saying you can run the unmodified software only and then
inserts some bull about the output being a covered work -- which in most
cases isn't, although the law gets a bit hairy there.  Think of it this way,
because MS created word doesn't make every word document covered by
copyright from MS, however, the look and feel of a website is certainly
copyright even if it is generated by scripts.  This project doesn't sound
like Open Source and someone should tell Ross Turk and get it booted from
SF.  Their licenses don't agree and the license in the code makes it clear
that it isn't GPLd -- it's a use license.  It doesn't even allow you modify
the software..

So, all that said, if you want to base your enterprise on what appears to be
a shoddily engineered code dump with no developer community and chinese
developers (better bone up on your Mandarin), by all means go ahead.  But if
your concern is really reinventing the wheel, this thing reminds me of a
plastic wheel you'd find on a big wheel bike. Stay away, do some research
about projects and technology, and write something that doesn't suck.  The
world has enough sucky software.

--Patrick
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