[Advisors] Thoughts on a license change.

[Anand Babu Periasamy]

I cannot agree more. I have been advocating to dual-license or re-license
GlusterFS under Apache Software License v2 for the last two years. GPL
defends freedom strongly, but hurts adoption. Folks at Red Hat care about
software freedom more than adoption. Lets push it once again.
-ab


On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 8:40 AM, John Mark Walker <johnmark at johnmark.org>wrote:

> Adding advisors list.
>  On Aug 10, 2013 11:16 AM, "David Nalley" <david at gnsa.us> wrote:
>
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> Just tossing out a question or two.
>>
>> So I'd like to propose that we consider changing to either the ASLv2,
>> MIT, or BSD licenses.
>>
>> Why? So I personally strongly identify with copyleft principles, but
>> my experience in the past few years are that the practical and
>> irrational concerns around licensing hurt adoption and hurt
>> contribution.
>>
>> Specifically, I found that several very large enterprises (~100k
>> employees each) said that they never even considered CloudStack at the
>> time because it was licensed under a GPL license. The dual-licensing
>> bit muddies the waters a bit rather than helps. For the folks who are
>> educated very well in open source, it's great. For folks who aren't as
>> sophisiticated in OSS licensing it's merely confusing.
>>
>> Second - there's the potential damper on contribution. Despite how
>> long GPL has been around, much FUD still remains around copyleft
>> licensing; and that keeps people employed by large corporate users
>> from contributing (at least that has been my experience) The more
>> enlightened understand that it isn't going to virally apply to
>> anything that they develop, but there is still a substantial number of
>> companies that simply don't get it.
>>
>> Finally - I don't see a downside to becoming more permissively
>> licensed aside from the work involved. Moving to a single, liberal
>> open source license has the potential for us to increase our community
>> size, both user and contributor. And from a weird marketing angle,
>> it's also likely, as a one time event, to drive some interest in the
>> project, as relicensing events tend to be geeky news that attracts
>> attention.
>>
>> Having done it once, I know it's a ton of work to get all of the
>> contributors to agree to relicense. That said, what are the collective
>> thoughts on this?
>>
>> --David
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>>
>
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>


-- 
-ab

Imagination is more important than knowledge --Albert Einstein
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