openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Raphael Valyi <rvalyi@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 3:03 PM, Stefan Rijnhart <stefan@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 15-09-11 19:02, Cuong Hoang Bui wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> OpenERP Medical project is now migrated to Tryton :( It's really
>> regretful. I think the main reason is related to license recently.
>>
>>
> Hi,
>
> the reasons cited for Medical supporting Tryton were:
>
> 1 support multiple frameworks for better continuity / vendor independence
> 2 users of Medical on Tryton can actually upgrade between versions, as
> Tryton supports upgrades through open source scripts included in the
> distribution
> 3 mentioning of community and ethics
>
> See http://www.meanmicio.org/2011/**05/medical-welcomes-tryton.**html<http://www.meanmicio.org/2011/05/medical-welcomes-tryton.html>
>
> I think they might have been hinting at OpenERP's license policy with the
> third reason, but the second reason seems more vital to me.
>

you can get more details from Luis Falcon, Medical / Gnu Health leader and
ex OpenERP pioneer since around 2006:
http://twitter.com/#!/meanmicio

Stefan, I looked at the KDE contributor agreement you mentioned earlier in
the thread and I should say I think this should have been the right way to
do the license change: both the agreement for potential future license
changes http://ev.kde.org/rules/fla.php and also the agreement when hey
changed the licensed from GPL2 to GPL3
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_Relicensing (I know some think it's
trivial and irrelevant, but please don't forget that even Linux didn't came
to such an agreement over what might look so insignificant to people that
don't pay attentions to the long term implications).
Not even asking contributors before instead was un-tactful at the very
best.

BTW, related to licensing: OpenERP SA just released a new Python RPC client
library, this time under BSD
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/openerp-client-lib/1.0.0 . I personally have
nothing against that, but this is an important fact that should send a
signal to RPC clients implementers that OpenERP SA don't consider it needs
to be AGPL (could be a grey area eventually as possibly constituting a
derived work though I consider myself that using a serialized public
protocols - similar to shell pipe, SQL socket, files - is a natural frontier
to the GPL or the AGPL virality).
Along with wrappers, this was for me the right way to package in a limited
way private secret trade implementations without having to break the social
contract between OpenERP SA and its community.

Now, I'm sorry, but because I'm confident we could have AGPL wrappers just
like you have proprietary NVidia or ATI driver running on GPL Linux, and
considering all the problems induced by this re-license, I'm unable to trust
the reasons that are being officially told for the re-license. So yes, I
cannot manage not thinking it's not a long term plan to build a
differentiated offer for OpenERP SA SaaS. At least it's a lack of warranty
for us now. Call me paranoiac...

It doesn't mean we stop working with OpenERP, but for sure something is
broken and it's a shame that collaboration is broken right at the time we
should instead have maximized collaboration to get things fixed before the
release. This is making us loose a precious time... As you can see, we are
still contributing some patches and merges, but yes it's an issue that it's
not under the only license we wish anymore (not to speak about our previous
work during 3 years of course).


Regards.

Raphaël Valyi