Open Source Licenses - Does Anyone Really Care
July 25th, 2006 by mkatzOur product MPP makes open source software easier to use and perform better by replacing integration tools like AmavisD with a high speed, scalable processing engine with extensive policy configuration options and centralized configurations. We respect open source licenses and never modify code without submitting our changes back to the community. MPP is a commercial application for the simple reason that we have to pay salaries and we don’t have the resources to wait until we have millions of users before we can make money.
I frequently run across customers who will evaluate our product and decide that it is better to modify AmavisD, SpamAssassin or Postfix to meet their needs rather than buy software. Perfectly fine decision in my view, except, when I ask if they will submit their changes back to the open source community I am always surprised at how few respect the GPL or BSD license terms. Less than half of the customers that I work with that have modified an open source solution to meet their needs submit their changes back to the community. Most will take open source as their own, change it at will, deploy in commercial applications and act like there is nothing wrong with this scenario.
It gets even dirtier on the vendor side as many antispam vendors are relying on hacked open source and pretending that it is their own code. We have verified 3 vendors so far, and judging by the number of claims that are similar, which we read frequently, it seems clear that including SpamAssassin with modifications is fair game for many vendors.
Open source is a business for big players. While open source was once a nice collaboration tool for developers it has become a business model in most cases. Every major product is either owned by a big company, group of companies or sponsored by a big company. If a great commercial product comes online, like salesforce.com, other players who can’t afford to compete will release ‘open source’ versions in the hopes that this will equalize the playing field. Often times the ‘open source’ versions are far too complicated for most people to contribute and the contributors are limited to one company.
So what’s the point? The point is that using open source against the license is tantamount to stealing and is illegal in the US. If you use open source, respect the license, if you are not willing to respect the license then buy commercial software.
Technorati Tags: open source, gpl, gnu
Posted in Opinions on Email Security |
July 25th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
There is an upside…
When 20 companies are basically redistributing the same thing, the original copyright holder typically becomes the authoritative “throat to choke” if any paid subscriptions are offered.
The conversion rate of monetizing open source subscriptions, like Red Hat and JBoss, is now pretty much equivalent to commercial applications anyway.
July 26th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
I agree with your comment, thank you. The lines are very blurred between open source and commercial, though I still think there is a difference between selling support subscriptions and stealing code.