Plus, I've had a similar experience with Stallman several years ago. He demanded a 5-page contract be signed by the organization before he would agree to speak, including special "perks", then started an argument with us without even knowing anything about us. The philosophy is interesting, but how much of it just originates from that one personality?
Statistics:Posted by pacoid — 16 May 2011 21:03
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Statistics:Posted by bentwonk — 28 Apr 2011 14:44
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Next releases will be in dual licensing CDDL + GNU GPLv3.
Statistics:Posted by admin — 27 Apr 2011 20:04
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We would like to contribute to the gephi project, use it as a library, but legally are required to keep some very application specific source code proprietary.
Thanks again. I await with interest.
Statistics:Posted by bentwonk — 27 Apr 2011 02:49
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A referendum has started amongst Gephi source code owners. Following is the copy of the email they received.
== CONTEXT ==
To sum up, we always used the GNU (A)GPLv3 to protect our work from a proprietary use. This mechanism is well suited for an end-user software primarily developed for academic purpose. However some major changes raises the question again, in particular:
- Gephi has become not only a software, but a platform to create new applications, integrate third-party technologies, and extend the functionalities with plugins.
- The Gephi Community is diversifying thus starts to include private companies and large research projects.
- We try to reach maturity with more developers and funding supports.
I'm both in contact with companies and research laboratories across Europe and the US. Both reported a strong motivation to use Gephi and to contribute (bug fixes, employment, direct fundings) but are unable to take Gephi because of two typical cases:
- for companies: impossibility to integrate part of Gephi (source code or library linking) in a final product with a proprietary/commercial license.
- for academics: impossibility to integrate part of Gephi (source code or library linking) in an Open Source program with a BSD or MIT license.
The future growth of our community will depend on how we can put them on board. We all have very diverse motivations to contribute to Gephi, but we all do it on our free time. So by this vote, I want to solve these issues:
- How do we reach a broader adoption of Gephi without sacrificing on our ownership rights and the idea of "common good"?
- How to create stable jobs for skilled Gephi developers?
I don't have direct answers of course, however we can shape our ecosystem to enable more opportunities if we choose the right licensing system.
== PROPOSAL ==
We initially started to oppose xGPL to BSD in the debate but I would like to propose a trade-off that seems to take all your considerations into account: a dual licensing using the GNU AGPLv3 and the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). The CDDL is a "weak copyleft" in a sense that every _file_ in CDDL must remain in CDDL, and source code modifications must be published. However one can combine the source code with other licensed code, which is not the case in GPL, LGPL and AGPL. This license is derived from the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and is well recognized by the Open Source Initiative (OSi) and industrials. NetBeans is released under a dual license CDDL-GPLv2 for instance: http://netbeans.org/cddl-gplv2.html
Consequences:
- improvements of the source code will remain in open source.
- one can create a specific version of Gephi for his needs with additional files in the desired license.
- using the Gephi Toolkit as a library will also be allowed whatever the case.
The GNU LGPL has a "weak copyleft" only when the code is used as a library. It would be okay for the Gephi Toolkit, but not for building applications over the graphical framework, which hence should be entirely in LGPL.
== QUESTION ==
Now the question of this referendum:
Do you agree to release the next official releases of Gephi source code in the dual license CDDL + GNU AGPLv3?
Please reply by YES, NO or NEUTRAL to all people in this list and not only me, and add your first name + name in clear after your reply.
== VOTING RULES ==
You have fifteen (15) days to reply from today. Votes will be closed after that on Tuesday May 3rd at 3pm (UTC+1). Only your first reply will be taken into account; more would mark your vote as "neutral".
Discussions are not allowed in this thread but should stand on the forum. A simple majority (>50%) of yes amongst yes+no is required to accept the proposal with at least 50% of the voting participants.
Statistics:Posted by admin — 18 Apr 2011 14:40
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A vote amongst the developers will stand before the end of the month. We also seriously consider the GNU LGPL license, which is less permissive than AGPL but has some restrictions.
Statistics:Posted by admin — 18 Apr 2011 09:43
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Please talk to us, we want to help, and have the resources to do so.
Statistics:Posted by bentwonk — 18 Apr 2011 04:22
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bentwonk wrote:This is a shame, as we have a number of experienced developers, and would probably add some value to Gelphi, in areas we could share back with the community (we have done this in the past with other projects).
...
So yes I would suggest BSD would be more pragmatic.
I want to echo Bentwonk's post. We are also a company who are developing proprietary graph visualization tools. I can pretty much echo his post verbatim. We are interested in a platform and can contribute to the community with full time developers, but we cannot use the product if we have to publish ALL our modifications. Some of them may be UI based and some analysis based. I personally think Gephi would be a great fit, but the AGPL license isn't compatible....
So yes I would suggest BSD would be more pragmatic.
Is it possible to change Gephi functionality significantly via a closed source plugin?
Statistics:Posted by asethi — 13 Apr 2011 17:30
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I was looking for a fast, java based graph display solution, and Gephi looks like a very good candidate. However since this is a business application, first thing I have to check is the licensing terms, problem is the methods we use to prepare the data to display are proprietary and we licence them, we could not open source there implementation.
A BSD or LGPL licence would work, but the current licence raises concerns for us including the proprietary methods. (5.c You must license the entire work, as a whole), and if we had to seek extensive legal advice on this, it would make the business types very nervous, and probably kill any change of using Gephi, regardless of the final legal verdict.
This is a shame, as we have a number of experienced developers, and would probably add some value to Gelphi, in areas we could share back with the community (we have done this in the past with other projects).
Of course if a commercial licence model also existed, we would be happy to consider it, and pay if we thought it fitted our needs. I guess a commercial would also licence would also allow us to contribute to the project as a whole in areas where we are able, however it may be harder to convince business types 'this is a good thing" if we are already paying a licence.
So yes I would suggest BSD would be more pragmatic.
Statistics:Posted by bentwonk — 11 Mar 2011 01:20
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Statistics:Posted by jeffg — 29 Nov 2010 17:52
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It seems that the GNU xGPL raises a legal risk that blocks commercial usages. But as it is important to keep the possibility to extend/specify the Gephi Platform inside the Free Software (GNU) paradigm, I propose the following solution:
The official trunk remains released in GNU AGPL.
However the Gephi Consortium can create commercial releases published in BSD on demand, as it has the right according to the CLA. Of course, if the Gephi Platform integrates a third-party software in GNU GPL/AGPL, it would be removed from this release. A list of included packages is available here.
The commercial releases can't be sold by the Gephi Consortium directly, as it is a non-for-profit organization. It is not strictly forbidden to sell, but the laws for NGOs are quite subtle in France and I really recommend not to do that. Anyway this legal structure is not made for this usage.
The mechanism
So who should sell commercial licenses created by the Gephi Consortium? I propose to grant this right to:
a) the Consortium members,
b) who have contributed by a commit on the trunk for more than one year,
c) and who have contributed with at least one commit during the past 6 months.
Why:
(a) ensures a control on the people who sells it so that bad behaviors (=violating the bylaws or the intellectual property rights) can lead to a quick expulsion. This measure is not retroactive to protect customers: if the vendor is no longer a member, the previous sales are still valid, but he loses the right to make sales at the day of his membership's termination.
(b) rewards long-term efforts.
(c) ensures the people are still somewhat active in contributing to the Free Software project, and have the basic knowledge to provide support.
According to the anti-trust compliance policy (PDF), the Gephi Consortium would not:
- set prices,
- signs agreements to allocate markets,
- calls for boycotts,
- prohibits or limits competition.
In a few words: this is a free market.
For customers
In a customer's point of view, this is simple: the Gephi Consortium would maintain a list of authorized vendors one can contact to ask for their offers and prices. A contract is made directly with this vendor and engages only the two parties, not the Gephi Consortium. Rights are granted by the BSD license without time limit and without restriction of usages (unless defined by the BSD license), for this sole release (=only this version of the source code).
What do you think about this solution?
Statistics:Posted by admin — 26 Nov 2010 01:23
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Gephi is a great tool. If company want to use it in their specific domains, (at least) most of them have to build their own plug-ins to process their own data. If they do that way, they have to open those source codes to public. I don't know if I am right about GPL license. If we use current AGPL, all the plugins should also use AGPL to release their products and all source codes. If so, companies might don't want to use Gephi because of such problem. To solve such problem, we can let those companies translate their data to GraphML or other supported format, so they shouldn't open their data related source codes. Gephi itself is still AGPL.
---a positive reason of changing license
But I didn't consider what if companies are interested in part of Gephi (shader engine just as you said). I don't know whether there are plenty of companies who are interested in part of Gephi, but the requirement did exists. If we have to migrate to Apache/BSD/etc , I agree that this is one supporting reason.
---a new advice
An advice just come to my mind. Gephi now have a toolkit and an application(In my mind, the toolkit is a subset of the application itself). What about migrating the toolkit to a commercial friendly license, and keep the application AGPL? It's similiar to double licenses.Is this useful? Just an advice:)
Statistics:Posted by Yestin — 19 Nov 2010 10:15
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Contamination of new features by GPL is indeed part of the "long term changes" plan.
When one think about it, this is a beautiful idea, perhaps too in advance for today industry, assuming everybody are "good players" and do not pursue selfish goals, like earning more money than others.
I believe that's how people who developed and use GPL see the licence.
However I agree with alex and other members of the forum who raised question of double licensing.
This could be a less ambiguous ("we are gpl, but want to do business!") and more assumed position for Gephi, although I don't exactly understand all subtleties yet (eg. can a Consortium manage money? is it really the best legal form for business partnerships, handle people, recommendation?)
Statistics:Posted by jbilcke — 17 Nov 2010 16:56
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jbilcke wrote:However, I have now a question: how will you get individuals release their additional work on the Toolkit, if they don't have to because of the licence?
Changes to core libraries are likely to be released because those who make them would want to ensure future versions of Gephi will have them as well, otherwise development would effectively be branched.Now, naturally it would be wrong to expect some of the completely new value added stuff on top of existing code to be released, but that's what businesses require in order to pay developers their salaries, which I think is not a bad thing: hardware isn't free, and neither is energy nor food, and especially not beer
Statistics:Posted by alexc — 17 Nov 2010 13:47
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jacomyma wrote:So let's address again this question: Why BSD is fostering more business opportunities than xGPL?
If by xGPL you mean LGPL then it might be as acceptable as BSD for businesses. I am new to Gephi, but I've been looking at a range of such products for sometime - they typically costs thousands of euros, but legal uncertainty will cost more and cost of opening all source code can be too high or often just not possible if business licensed some non-open source libraries.
In practice that means that business would prefer to pay money to commercial vendor to get peace of mind, even if they've got inferior product.
I don't think Gephi is one of the many usual open source products - you need to have data to visualise in the first place, this is something businesses do have and they need a tool they can use or build upon.
You actually have a pretty unique chance to get businesses on board - this will fund further development AND help Gephi live up to its full potential.
Another thing you need to consider is that (in my view but I am not a lawyer) your current license for toolkit might not actually help you achieve what you want anyway - effectively (again it's my view) it can be used by a business to feed its data for visualization without making any chances to source code, and thus not releasing anything and yet Gephi won't benefit from funds that could have been made available to it had you offered same toolkit under more permissive license. Once again - I am not a lawyer and I did not consult them as it would cost rather too much - we are not doing anything like this at the moment anyway.
I'd recommend offering toolkit/library for free only for non-commercial, academical usage - anything commercial and you sell license under more permissive license (BSD or LGPL - better BSD as it can cover not just library but front end as well).
Just my 2 cents.
Alex
Statistics:Posted by alexc — 17 Nov 2010 13:44
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So let's address again this question: Why BSD is fostering more business opportunities than xGPL?
I agree on the principle of having more business opportunities. But I don't see why BSD is better (I ask for actual arguments, I ask for pragmatism, I can't make my mind on the basis of a generic theoretical discussion).
Statistics:Posted by jacomyma — 17 Nov 2010 08:16
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Both Free Software and Open source allow an application to be sold "as it is" by...anybody. Today, you or your company can package Gephi and sell it at the price you want, for the companies you want, with the support you want. The only restriction is to change the name, because Gephi is a trademark and you'll have to negotiate the right to use the name with the Gephi Consortium. To this point, we are in the same situation as the Mozilla Foundation.
----
Now, more from my personal point of view:
I worked hard during two years for the Gephi project - weeks, evenings and weekends. Please don't imagine just a second that the worldwide recognition of Gephi is what it is now just because this is a great software. This is a prerequisite of course, but we also applied online marketing techniques and individual psychology to gain our visibility. These words are here just to remember that the development is not the only work in a software creation. Every contributions are great. So I would have the same position if I had coded a lot.
Surprisingly, I feel okay if someone/company I don't know build products or services the way they wants, and make money with it. And I would love to see a successful product based on Gephi so that this company would have significant benefits.
Why? Because I know that they will need advices, support, pro training, and would even pay me, you or a current Gephi developer to implement the features they need. The more they are able to make money with Gephi, the more they need the knowledge and skills of the people who already know Gephi. By giving the code, we would generate such opportunities that the community in general would benefit from it. The Gephi Open Source project would then attract even more skilled developers to contribute to the project, since they could reasonably expect very good job opportunities, like being hired at LinkedIn...
At the Consortium scale, we would be able to propose job partnerships with companies in a win-win scenario. Imagine that a company would need a shader engine for graphs into their own products, but is not interested by Gephi itself. As the Gephi community is recognized to lead the field of graph viz engineering now, they have interest of our experiences - don't forget that time is money for them. It would be a good deal for them to hire Antonio, for example, and share the code in Open Source so that a large community can test it, give quick feedbacks and real use-cases...The Gephi community would benefit rapidly from an efficient shader engine, and the company to have hired a skilled developer and lowered the cost with high quality. Btw, having opportunities means that you won't need to beg for money anymore - you'll have offerings because of the communication efforts made by the Gephi Consortium.
This is a network approach. You should understand that by lowering the barrier we will have an effect similar to percolation in systems, and business opportunities will suddenly become the rule instead of remaining the exception. The community will gain professional developers who dedicate a regular part of their working time to contribute to the Gephi project, instead of sacrificing their private time to work apart of their _real_ job. If the Open Source paradigm exists and is supported by companies, it is because they have interest in such a system, and keeping most of the work in Open Source cuts development costs for pre-competitive technologies. Gephi is such a technology, as it is mostly used in Research and R&D departments.
Statistics:Posted by admin — 17 Nov 2010 00:41
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I developed a tool for Firefox (Navicrawler) and searched money to keep working on it as a part of my PhD. Orange (formerly France Telecom) agreed to give money to my employer to complete the missing funds of the project (enough to support several month of a full time work). I was supported by a head Researcher (D. Cardon, eternal thanks to him) but I still had to pass the wall of the lawyers. I was very clear about the fact that the software would be free and open source, and he totally agreed on that. But we didn't know how the lawyers would react to this. So what happened ?
They asked me if the license could be GPL (!). It was actually the only one license of this kind that they knew (at this time). I naturally agreed on that, and the Navicrawler is ruled by the GPL since... And it was quite easy to make the deal, despite my fears about a big capitalistic firm (where people still tend to suicide these days
).My dissonant conclusion, is that GPL might also have some advantages for business, or at least it was the case few years ago (but it may be an exception).
Statistics:Posted by jacomyma — 16 Nov 2010 17:43
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First,I want to discuss the two questions proposed by Seb.
That means if we use a commercial friendly license, companies will take much more effort on the development of Gephi. Our community will also have much more full-time enginners. Of course, the development progress will increase, but this might have some hidden dangers. Not all the companies is as enlightened as company hired Seb and Mathieu, they are not forced to share their source codes with the community. The companies will enclose their codes for their own development.Efficient development is only possible when someone has a full-time work on the project. It implies a correct salary, so the ability for the community at large to hire. That was the case for Mathieu and I ; that's why we were so fast.
I don't know why should companies pay for lawyers if they open their source code to public (This is a law problem:0). In my mind, the cost exists because they want to make money by the source code.The GNU xGPL doesn't offer in practice the possibility to create industrial value, not because of the restrictions themselves but because it's too expensive for companies to get it evaluated by lawyers. There is barely no "employability" outside research for our developers to work on Gephi itself.
Talking about the "employability", If developers work on Gephi itself, he/she can gain lots of programming ability, know theroy of visualization. By those abilities, they can get a good job. They should not only pay attention on companies which need Gephi developers.
On the other side, Gephi is a graph visualization tool, it can be used in many specific domains which might contains some secret. But I don't think the tool itself is secret, the most secret point is the data. If it did need to protect some secret things, we can deal with in this way: Let the companies submit an authoried certification, which can prove the project is a secret project and can't open to public. Before that, we give the administrators the rights to confirm the certification. This might be a new kind of licience.
Basicly, I don't quite agree with migrating license from xGPL to BSD. But any way, Seb and Mathieu is the creator and main developers of Gephi, you have the most dominant on the codes. I will support you whatever the decision is.
I also have some trouble, If we migrating license from xGPL to BSD since Gephi, that means we have two licenses on Gephi0.7. I'm afraid that the road will divided in two ways. Some will continue the xGPL, and others may use the BSD for their own and commerical aim.
Statistics:Posted by Yestin — 16 Nov 2010 10:32
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