[GLLUG] Burnbox Future

[STeve Andre']

On Friday 27 April 2007 20:36:09 Richard Houser wrote:
> Clay Dowling wrote:
> > Okay, I completely forgot to bring this up last night when we were all
> > assembled, but I'm gonna bring it up here.
> >
> > At the con and afterwards I had a few requests for copies of the burnbox
> > software, which is a very cool thing.  The question is, how do we want to
> > handle it?  In the strictest sense, because no money changed hands,
> > Burnbox is my intellectual property and I can do with it as I darned well
> > please.  The reality is though that it's always been done as something
> > for GLLUG, and I want to see how the group feels about it.
> >
> > The obvious thing to do is release it as an open source project.  As
> > somebody who is trying to bring a source code management tool to market,
> > I'd also like to host the project on my server, or at least a server
> > running my software suite (subversion, CVSTrac and my SQLite3
> > authentication module).  Is this a route that would be acceptable, or do
> > people have strong feelings that it should be released in some other
> > manner?
> >
> > Clay
>
> As long as you have sole copyright to all the code, I think your best
> bet would be an OSS license like the GPL.  I doubt anyone would have
> issues with you selling commercial licenses as well, like MySQL does.
> Avoid the BSD style licenses like the plague if you have any interest in
> selling it to commercial parties at a future time.

I do not want to start a flame fest over this, but I can't let that comment
about BSD licenses go uncommented on.  A BSD license gives the maximum
flexability.  If you use a GPL license companies are far more likely to stay
away from it, due to the viral concepts in it.  Companies *do* buy BSD
licensed stuff.  Usually they do so because they then know that they can
get help from the author.  A few thousands of dollars for something already
written is *far* cheaper than attempting to write it in-house.

I prefer the BSD license because of its simplicity.  In consulting once I was
dealing with two laywers who were coming up to speed on open source
licenses.  After they got over the concept of someone handing out the
code for free with no expectations of anything (BSD), they got to the GPL
and started pondering it.  And pondered more.  They understood the
idea (and apprecaited it) of the GPL but saw interesting parts which a
shark laywer could chomp on and do things with.

--STeve Andre'