openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Fabien Pinckaers <fp@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Leonardo,

> - on one side, some people, especially tryton supporters, are
> behaving in a way I don't agree with. We all make our choices,
> any of us is free work on OpenERP, Tryton, SAP, OpenBravo, a
> bakery shop or whatever, but that doesn't entitle us to tweet
> #openerp #fail and similar FUD as I don't do against all
> competitors I can think of. As Davide said, that doesn't put
> Tryton in a good light. If important contributors leave,
> that's a pity for the project and we should talk, but that
> has nothing to do with flamewars.
> 
> - on the other hand, some people are genuinely worried about
> what can happen of their contributions, many would like more
> transparency and openness on the mailing lists (asking people
> to refrain from hard FUD and keep to standard criticism).
> Also, we were a bit worried seeing you tweet about giving up
> the licence exception and then updating the website offering
> it anyway without any further discussion.

Yes, may be I should explain this mistake of mine.

When I announced this, we found a solution that:
  - is compatible with AGPL
  - while NOT being a dual licence
  - allows customer to not redistribute what they do like in GPL

----- Here is part of an internal email at that time ------------------

Have a look at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html, section 7.
The AGPL accepts to put Additional permissions in the licence:
  "Additional permissions" are terms that supplement the terms of this
  License by making exceptions from one or more of its conditions.

You can put "Additional permissions" only if it can be reLicenced under
the terms of the AGPL:
  "If a license document contains a further restriction but permits
  relicensing or conveying under this License, you may add to a covered
  work material governed by the terms of that license document, provided
  that the further restriction does not survive such relicensing or
  conveying."

So, the AGPL accepts that we add an additional permission as allowed by
the section 7, only if this permission can be removed by anyone that has
the code. So we could have added an additional permission "Private Use"
in the AGPL.

The customer is in his rights to relicence under AGPL but he will not do
it. Everyone is happy, OpenERP remains 100% AGPL. This is exactly what
we need. We incorporate this in the software itself, so that we don't
have to ship a second version of the software.

Moreover, it forbids anyone to create a business reselling modules as
the first one that buys the software is in his right to redistribute for
free.

It seems to be the solution we are looking for:
  - similar to a GPL for 'private use' customers
  - AGPL for everyone
------------------------------------------------------------------------


In order to do things cleanly, we contacted the FSF to get their vision
on this. It tooks some weeks as they seems as overloaded as us.

Even if it seems ok with the AGPL, we came to the conclusion that it's
more transparent to create two different licences to avoid discussions
and trolls on the validity of such an "additional permission". The FSF
proposed to call it AGPL+XXX. Moreover, it allowed people that did not
wanted to put under AGPL+additional permission to keep a pure AGPL
version on their own module.


So, this is why we decided to change our mind and go for a dual licence
that fits our requirement. I apologize for this communication mistake.


Please note that we tried to discuss this with the community and
partners but it became a public flamewar even before having explained
the things properly. Usual activists created big FUD around something
not clearly explained which was very bad. So we decided to make things
very clear before communicating more on this topic. That's why we
launched with the FAQ and the communication email to explain everything.



It's clear that we did some communication mistakes but it does not
change the fact that it's a good move and it does not impact at all our
open source commitment.

> That said, we're working on OpenERP towards our common goal
> to conquer the world.

Yes. We are best developers than marketing guys, let's do what we
can do :)


-- 
Fabien Pinckaers
CEO OpenERP
Chaussée de Namur 40
B-1367 Grand-Rosière
Belgium
Phone: +32.81.81.37.00
Fax: +32.81.73.35.01
Web: http://openerp.com