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SQL-Ledger Relicensed, Community Gagged
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Apr 15, 2007 01:38 PM
from the i-can't-heear-you dept.
from the i-can't-heear-you dept.
Ashley Gittins writes "Users of the popular accounting package SQL-Ledger were being kept in the dark about a recent license change. Two weeks ago a new version of the software was released but along with it came the silent change of license from GPLv2 to the 'SQL-Ledger Open Source License' — presumably in an effort to prevent future forks like LedgerSMB. As it turns out, the author was making deliberate attempts to prevent the community from finding out about the license change. No posts to the SQL-Ledger mailing lists asking about the license change were getting past moderation and direct questions to the author were going unanswered. Just recently the license was switched back to GPLv2. This behavior is not a first for this particular project, and is part of the reason for the original LedgerSMB fork. Does a project maintainer have an ethical obligation to notify his or her community of a license change? What about a legal obligation?"
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SQL-Ledger Relicensed, Community Gagged
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Oh no! (Score:5, Funny)
He did notify of the license change (Score:1, Insightful)
Legal obligation? Probably not... Ethical? (Score:3, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Re:Legal obligation? Probably not... Ethical? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.myspace.com/mypetmachinemusic)
No. There's only a problem if someone made a fork and tried to change it from GPL to something else. This was a move by the guy who holds the copyrights to the code. the copyright holder can, at anytime, decide he wants to move his code to another license. the catch is that all previously released code is still under the previous license. That is, if i release Foobar v1 under the GPL, then I release Foobar v1.1 under BSD, v1.0 remains licensed under the GPL, and you are free to take that code and start your own version, Forkbar v1.0. However, you must always keep it as GPL, because you don't own the copyright on the code; you only have access to it because of the GPL.
Re:Legal obligation? Probably not... Ethical? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.kutulu.org/)
* Retroactively re-license existing versions from the GPL to the new version: * Unlaterally re-license code that includes third part submissions, since most of the translation packages were done by user submission.
Ignoring those two actions, even if the license change is strictly legal, it's downright underhanded to pull a stunt like he did. He didn't just change the license on his software; he put out a point release on the primary distribution site, after having changed the license terms included with the package, then refused to let anyone bring it up on the official support mailing list. How many of us would notice if we downloaded and installed the lastest apache or postfix or whatever, and the license had silently and magically changed to a closed one?
Re:Legal obligation? Probably not... Ethical? (Score:4, Informative)
(http://lith.ath.cx/)
Update and reply (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.metatrontech.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 21, @01:39PM)
In the time since this was submitted, Mr Simader has seen the light and reverted to the GPL, albeit very unhappily. Such is life.
I don't actually begrudge Mr Simader the right to choose whatever copyright license he wants to have for his work. That is his moral right, and I have no problem with it. However, I was very unhappy with the fact that a lot of contributors' code, including all the translations, were still licensed under the GPL and since his new license was not compatable with it, I felt that he was causing problems for everyone including our project which is why I began contacting contributors privately about the whole thing.
Also, in the event of a license change away from a specific and well-understood OSI-approved license, I think that the developer also needs to give users a heads-up before they install the new version. This is, however, as far as I see the ethical obligations. And even these were not followed.
Finally, on the LedgerSMB project we are committed to rewriting the entire application, not just in order to prevent further conflict with Mr Simader but also in order to create a better program and one which can be more easily maintained. But we would be remiss if we didn't recognize that our success is in fact partly based on his.
Re:Legal obligation? Probably not... Ethical? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.vhemt.org/)
The author of the work can always release his work under any license he sees fit. The problem would be any code contributed by others in this case.
switched back (Score:2, Redundant)
(http://thepeckfamily.us/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 10, @10:49AM)
Relicensing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading comprehension (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday August 30 2006, @10:21AM)
Legal: No, Ethical: Maybe... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Re:Legal: No, Ethical: Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't always work either. Just read the EULA for, well, pretty much any piece of commercial software. If the vendor disappears, decides not to support the product, if it vaporizes your computer and most of the building its in
Looks like the project is officially being killed. (Score:3, Informative)
Definitely unethical (Score:5, Insightful)
Simader (Score:4, Informative)
Finally the death of his project.
Licenses (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Friday November 21 2003, @06:04PM)
Ethical obligation: certainly, I would argue.
Legally, it's in the ballpark of something like this:
You cannot change the license on contributions to your project without permission of every contributor.
The enforceability of a license often depends in no small part on the notice of the change. For example, a quiet change of the license obligating you to make retroactive payments for usage, where you would never have predicted this, will likely be unenforceable. On the other hand, a small change in the license that requires redistributers to redistribute source code in an open format such as tarballs is probably enforceable.
An author can be prevented from suing you for breach of license if the author changed the license without telling you, and you reasonably relied upon the prior license not changing to do something reasonable under the prior license. This is the legal concept of estoppel - colloquially, the author is estopped from enforcing the license.
Another concept, unjust enrichment, may also apply. In this case, the author changed the license, and intentionally didn't tell his contributors who kept making valuable contributions, the author may be deprived of his enrichment, because it was unjust, and the contributors may have a right to withdraw their contributions, or have project remain under the old license insofar as those contributions apply (for example).
Mind you, these are common law concepts, and no doubt modified by statutory schemes (e.g. the UCC).
The obvious answer to the question is .... (Score:2)
(http://threeseas.net/ | Last Journal: Friday January 18 2002, @01:44PM)
The evidence of this is shown in the development of GPLv3
It's old school to bait and switch.
It up and coming to be Honest and open.
Perhaps honesty and openness was what was needed regarding the concerns that resulted in the flip flop?
Would the flip flop had happened?
Not a Unique Phenomenon (Score:4, Informative)
Needless to say, I'm never using PDFlib again, and I'm re-writing all of my code to use FPDF (http://www.fpdf.org), which is free, and works just as well. It's even easier to write code for. Stay away from PDFlib!
Re:Not a Unique Phenomenon (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://dinther.dnsalias.com/)
Never, ever, ever buy third party libraries without source. Without source you no longer own the solution you create. I have seen it happen many times before and these days I put a lot of pressure of the library vendor with the hard rule, "No source no Sale". Many of these third party library providers have gone out of business or shifted focus to other products. Without source I would be in trouble.
Never, ever, ever buy any software at all that licenses against a specific set of hardware.
Lately I more often contemplating switching OS to get away from the worst black box of all... "Windows" With Vista and the brain dead security rules introduced it becomes impossible to write software.
Here is the only license (Score:2, Funny)
(Last Journal: Friday November 09, @01:36AM)
"The party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part." [searchlores.org]
TLUG (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Thursday December 08 2005, @04:33PM)
http://tlug.ss.org/wiki/Meetings:2007-04 [ss.org]
The talk was by a Ledger SMB core developer.
I bought what he said... Ledger SMB is now on Source Forge, reacts to security issues,
accepts patches, is converting to a saner architecture, uses CURRENCY instead of FLOAT for money.
Seems like its a winner.
Other Accounts Packages (Score:5, Informative)
* Front Accounting
* Ledger SMB
* WebERP
* OpenAccounting
* TurboCash
o Windows
* GnuCash
* Personal
o HomeBank
o jGnash
o GFP
o Grisbi
* CK-Ledger
* Compiere
* Lazy8
* Quasar
o Linux Canada
* phpCOIN
* opentaps
* Bambooinvoice
* GnuAccounting
* phpOrganisation
* OpenBravo
They are in various states of repair and different markets from the personal to the one man band to the multinational.
SQL-Ledger = Cavalier Security (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.desertzephyr.com/employees/calabrese)
"Well, I wouldn't worry about it. We are not that concerned with security because there's nothing that SQL Ledger works with that would be of interest to anyone except an accountant, and I don't think we need to worry about a bunch of rogue accountants."
That statement alone made me not want to touch the packae, even though it looked very nice otherwise.
AGG 2.4 BSD - AGG 2.5 GPL (Score:2)
(http://comonad.com/)
I'm still trying to figure out why the Anti-Grain Geometry library went from BSD-like to GPL a few months ago with no code change. http://www.antigrain.com/ [antigrain.com]
I haven't found any information on why the switch occurred and the author doesn't appear to have explained his motivations. I find myself working on a project in which I can employ 2.4, but I can't upgrade to 2.5 due to the licensing restriction, so I must either fork and maintain what I am using from 2.4 or abandon the library.
The bait-and-switch nature of the change is somewhat troubling to me, though I admit the principal author of AGG doesn't appear to be gagging inquiries like in the SQLLedger/LedgerSMB case.
maybe no obligation (Score:2)
If there are third party contributions, it depends on whether the contributors assigned the copyright to him. If they did not, he can't change the license. If they did, it depends on what the copyright assignment forms imposed on him.
In many cases, I wouldn't consider a GPL->proprietary license change a big deal for a package like this; basically, it means that the maintainer cannot, or doesn't want to, maintain the software under the GPL anymore. Whether he just stops it altogether or tries to make a go at it commercially doesn't make such a big difference to people interested in open source.
GPL->proprietary changes (or similar license shenanigans) are a big problem for infrastructure products (libraries, virtual machines, compilers), because they have a lot of downstream dependencies, and they pose the conundrum whether one should stay with "the standard" or with the open source version.
Look at webERP instead (Score:1)
(http://xtronics.com)
- there are perl threaded bugs thatthey never would fix...
Clueless (Score:2)
License's fork? (Score:1)
Re:Can we please lay off the emotional language (Score:4, Informative)
I think the bottomline appears to be that the guy Open Sourced something and didn't quite understood the consequences. And it's easy to stack mistake on mistake once you're on the wrong foot..
Having followed both mailing lists I must say that the LedgerSMB one is very lively indeed - and has more people visible in development. That doesn't mean I don't feel sorry for the original author, but I think he may need a bit of a spokesperson between him and the rest of the world..
Re:Can we please lay off the emotional language (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://trolltalk.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 03, @08:45PM)
"That doesn't mean I don't feel sorry for the original author, but I think he may need a bit of a spokesperson between him and the rest of the world.."
Deiter may have switched the license back to GPLv2, but at this point, why bother ... he's done more to promote the competing fork as being the "legit, safe" one than anything else.
Re:Can we please lay off the emotional language (Score:2)
(http://www.vhemt.org/)
I see you didn't RTFS (Score:2)
"Just recently the license was switched back to GPLv2...
This is what happens when you don't read the summary correctly ;)
Re:Can we please lay off the emotional language (Score:2)
Moderated and Removed Means Gagging Dipshit (Score:1)
Re:What? (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/~nurb432/ | Last Journal: Friday August 27 2004, @03:24PM)
If no one cared, there wouldn't have been a fork a while ago.
But that said, it *is* Deiter's software, so he can change the licensing if he wants. ( and we can all go about our merry way with the fork too.. )
Re:If it's GPL, doesn't it have to stay that way? (Score:1)
Re:Can we please lay off the emotional language (Score:2)
(http://www.redbearnet.com/)
I think it's pretty clear to most people from the summary that the word "gagged" isn't being used in the strict legal or even literal sense, but rather in the figurative sense:
Having the moderators (or sole moderator, if that is the case) of what is probably the main "community" discussion forum blocking any and all posts asking or making statements about a particular topic seems to fit pretty nicely into this definition. Doesn't seem all that emotional either, more like an accurate, factual description, although not written in the technically precise legal terms you would have preferred. Any emotional reaction should come from your abhorrence, hatred, loathing, detestation, execration, revulsion, disgust, repugnance, horror, odium, or aversion to the entire concept of censorship in even the most minor situation relating to the legal rights of others.
Hopefully this project will now die a horrible death after being forked yet again by people who are actually interested in maintaining and improving it for current users without attempting to exercise control over the behavior of the users. No one should put up with this behavior from the developer of any software you rely on to do something as important as keeping your business running.
Lay off the echo chambers? (Score:2)
(http://www.building26.org/)
What part of "posts didnt make moderation" did you not see? To preempt it, a private (exclusivist) entity used moderation to remove objection. That's gagging, no matter how the entity was grouped. No "liberty to exclude" excuses can explain it.
Read the following:
No posts to the SQL-Ledger mailing lists asking about the license change were getting past moderation and direct questions to the author were going unanswered.
Re:Can we please lay off the emotional language (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/~nurb432/ | Last Journal: Friday August 27 2004, @03:24PM)
Re:Can we please lay off the emotional language (Score:2, Informative)
(http://www.purple.dropbear.id.au/)
Re:Can we please lay off the emotional language (Score:1)