Drupal, Pengiuns, and Sharks

Submitted by robin on April 29, 2008 - 9:05am.

I had the joy of attending Linuxfest Northwest on April 26 in Bellingham, WA. The weather was great (just like last year), and the atmosphere relaxed and fun.

Linuxfest is a 2-day community event, run by volunteers and free to the public. It is such a cozy atmosphere, and it is easy to interact with the speakers and the exhibitors.

It was nice to see Drupal well represented this year. One room was devoted to Drupal talks all day. In fact, besides the Linux Lab, Drupal was the only topic that seemed to hold a room all day. Way to go David Hazel, Jakob Perry, Angus Pratt, and Jennifer Hodgdon who all talked about Drupal in different and interesting ways. Check out the first room listed on the schedule (Haskell-103): that's all Drupal folks!

One talk I attended focused on the idea of hosted services and licensing. Ted Haeger discussed the AGPL which CivicActions uses and the idea of developers developing, testing, and deploying all through a web interface. He is with Bungee Labs which offers this type of development platform, but the Bungee Labs platform is proprietary and closed. You keep the copyright of your own code and may use any license.

What saddens me about this talk is that it seems like companies are looking at GPL version 2 as having a loop hole. That as long as they are just "hosting" and not distributing code, then they may forego contributing their changes back to the community. These same companies rely on free and open software to provide their products and services.

Is it possible that we have had this brilliant wave of free and open source software only to have it taken away as companies start locking down bits and pieces of software they think is Intellectual Property they will not share?

A new generation of programmers may not understand what web they are surfing. Ted referred to using Bungee Labs' product as like crack...you become addicted to it. Programmers may find themselves stuck in a scenario where they have come to rely on a proprietary platform which is closed source. They will have bits of code that can not run without the proprietary platform. What is the point of releasing code under the AGPL if it relies on a platform which is closed? It is not secure nor stable. This is not an option I could offer to any client who is looking to reduce risk and costs.

Yet, look at Google Maps? The UI is fun and easy. Drupal integrates its with GMap module. What happens if Google takes Google Maps away? Of course, they won't do that, but what if they start charging you 1 cent per map view or 10 cents per map view? Will you keep using it? Would you switch to an alternative? Is there an alternative?

The sharks are circling...watch out!

"FOSS vacuum" companies and my presentation at LFNW
Submitted by Ted Haeger on May 1, 2008 - 11:29am.

Robin:
Your post is well written, but it reveals that I may not have communicated what I was hoping to. It concerns me. Rather than having my presentation sadden you (as you state in your post), I had hoped to generate some awareness about the existence of the impending problems with the GPL, and also expose the importance of the AGPL.
A key point of my talk was that GPLv3 has the very same SaaS/ASP loophole as GPLv2. In other words, unlike GPLv2, GPLv3 was deliberately designed to have this loophole. (I have heard that Google was one of the primary voices that lobbied to preserve it, but I could not find a substantiating article.)

This loophole is one of the primary reasons why I have been going out to regional LinuxFests and presenting this talk: Free Software enthusiasts should know about how GPLv3 is still ineffectual for hosted solutions, and that there is a coming age of hosted development that requires us to take notice and deal with the issue. (See http://www.linux-mag.com/id/3017 for a good article on this.)

Facebook and Salesforce.com are two of the major platform companies who currently exploit this loophole. (They are also silent about the issues that I spoke about at LFNW.)

Regarding Bungee Connect being proprietary (toward the end of your post), I hope that I stated well enough that Bungee Labs is actively driving toward open source. Your statement, "Programmers may find themselves stuck in a scenario where they have come to rely on a proprietary platform which is closed source," is quite correct. Please also recall that I directly referred the audience to RMS' article "The Java Trap" (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html), and stated that until Bungee Connect is properly made open source, that this scenario is very much applicable to my company's platform.

Please stay tuned to Bungee Labs does this year, and by all means hold me to account if you do not see us move in the right direction.

Thanks for the write up, and drop me a line if you would like to discuss this more.

--Ted

Ted Haeger
http://reverendted.wordpress.com

Thanks for the compliment.
Submitted by robin on May 5, 2008 - 7:54pm.

Thanks for the compliment. We are on the same side of this debate, I am frustrated that people feel the need to hide software from one another. I would not be where I am today without the GPL. I work on a LAMP stack, and I want to keep it that way. I am happy to work with CivicActions and release code under the AGPL or the GPL (either version). It is one way I can give back to the community that gave me the free and open tools to build web applications.

Thanks for clarifying the GPLv3 loophole. I remember you stating it in your talk, but I thought you were still discussing GPLv2.

I am happy to see any company make the switch and release code under the GPL or AGPL. I would like to see more companies head in that direction. I want to see other companies respect free and open software by going beyond the GPL and always offering their code changes back to the community no matter what license they use. It does not have to be written in a license for people to do the right thing. I choose to offer my code changes under the GPL. I am not sure why other people can not make this choice as well.

As for the Java trap, I agree that we agree. For me, it is easy. I want to use software released under the GPL or a GPL compatible license or the AGPL (to list them all). I am not interested in proprietary code. I appreciate that BungeeLabs is having this discussion in-house, and when the entire BungeeConnect stack is released under a GPL or the AGPL, I will take a look.