Source-opening of open-source ?
zx recently pointed out to this interesting, source-opening of a very popular eclipse based web development tools, Aptana.
Could this be a case of an over zealous new management person who’s at worst ignored his/her devs’ inputs.
So what does this mean to me as an eclipse developer ?
This change in the licence terms mean that in case I build plugins on top of Aptana, then I need to ask for a licence from Aptana because “The new license just gives us[Aptana] more visibility into who is redistributing the IDE. We[Aptana] want to keep a very high level of quality, therefore we[Aptana] want to be aware of any redistribution of the IDE, and we[Aptana] ask that if you are going to redistribute, you contact us for a license (free or otherwise).”
The license faq makes for an interesting read.
So what are the implications of this going forward?
It may mean that the next time I contribute something back to any open source project, I may need to look up as to what may become of my contribution. I contributed my work under EPL, but since the copyright belongs to the company maintaining the project, the company may just decide to change the license terms altogether.
I may also want to investigate who makes such decisions in the company. Is it an aliance of contributors from various companies (like OSGi); is it a foundation like Apache, or Eclipse, or Gentoo that has representatives from a lot of other companies which may put their foot down on such issues ?
Ketan,
I wanted to comment about a remark you made regarding contribution under the EPL. Let me preface the remarks with the standard IINAL and this is not legal advice:
“I contributed my work under EPL, but since the copyright belongs to the company maintaining the project, the company may just decide to change the license terms altogether.”
The copyright to EPL’d code stays with the contributor, not the company or entity maintaining the project. For example, if you go look at the source in the various Eclipse projects you’ll see copyright notices for IBM, BEA, Actuate, etc since those companies wrote and contributed the code. You’ll never see a copyright for the Eclipse Foundation itself. The same is true in your case for your contribution so it cannot be changed to Aptana’s license without your express consent and recontribution.
In fact, when the Eclipse Foundation went from the CPL to the EPL a couple of years ago, each past contributor had to be contacted and had to agree to the license change or the code was removed from Eclipse and rewritten. It was not a small effort.
Regards,
Todd
Todd
5 Sep 07 at 7:21 pm
Todd,
I’m speaking of a general case where the copyright for the contribution is retained by the company/foundation that maintains it.
In case of code contributed to eclipse, I’m aware of the fact that the copyright does does belong to the individual contributions, and I believe this is a good thing to happen.
Ketan
5 Sep 07 at 7:51 pm
Ketan,
You can absolutely write and distribute anything you write for our IDE. I’ve written a short blog post to try to clarify some items, you can read it here:
http://www.aptana.com/blog/?p=179
Thanks,
Paul Colton
Paul Colton
5 Sep 07 at 9:20 pm
We just announced that we added GPL as one of the license options to the Aptana IDE. You can read all about it here: http://www.aptana.com/blog/?p=184
Paul Colton
21 Sep 07 at 5:50 am