[Advisors] Thoughts on a license change.

[David Nalley]

Personally, I see dual-licensing as being better, but not ideal. It
still leaves a lot of confusion on the part of the non-FOSS-zealots.
I'd personally advocate for a single permissive license.

--David

On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 1:54 PM, Anand Babu Periasamy
<abperiasamy at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Board mailing list
>>> Board at gluster.org
>>> http://supercolony.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/board
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Board at gluster.org
>> http://supercolony.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/board
>>
>
>
>
> --
> -ab
>
> Imagination is more important than knowledge --Albert Einstein