Kirill Grouchnikov's Blog

Open Source Archives

Software licenses, the letter and the spirit

Some of you most probably have heard about the latest round of "Microsoft against open source". It all started here when a developer of a plugin for various versions of VS.NET has decided to vent his feelings over a two-year long dispute with Microsoft over the license terms of free version of the Microsoft IDE and whether his plugin is in violation of its EULA. There's a lengthy e-mail exchange (hopefully complete and unabridged), and it's quite an interesting read. I highly recommend reading it before jumping to any conclusions.

The lead product manager of Microsoft has promptly responded here and here, and the comments are interesting as well (coming from both sides of the "fence"). And now it gets interesting.

The story was picked up by The Register, providing a highly biased and opinionated view on the subject. The plugin developer is portrayed as the ultimate victim, and Microsoft is portrayed as the ultimate villain. From here, the story was picked by the usual suspects, including SlashDot and others, making its way to JavaLobby as well.

I usually don't do this, but i have decided to copy-paste the comment i left on that Javalobby thread to my own blog. So here it is:

----------------------------------

Everybody applauds FSF for making a special clause in GPLv3 that was added because Microsoft has found a legal loophole allowing the deal with Novell. Microsoft didn't break the terms of GPLv2, but they're the bad guys for breaking the spirit of GPL.

This guy (allegedly technically) didn't break EULA (although he's the one that provided the correspondence, i guess Microsoft would be very quick to point the legal violation on its blog), but most certainly broke the spirit of EULA. Somehow, Microsoft is the bad guy here once again.

The end result - bad publicity for Microsoft, a lot of people suddenly aware of this guy's product (which is sold for some versions), most probably Microsoft won't go to the court (especially since the guy resides in UK), and most definitely the next EULA will have much more verbose clause regarding the limitation, alienating people along the way (anyone complaining that it takes weeks to read GPLv3? all i hear are complaints about Windows licenses and how they go on and on).

----------------------------------

So, what are your thoughts on this?

Genuitec, Hibernate and playing nice with open source

It all started on The Server Side where Gavin King accused Genuitec of "skirting waaay to close to an LGPL violation over bundled modifications to Hibernate Tools". Genuitec CEO hasn't addressed this issue, instead choosing to focus on other issues (which sound plausible, but are not relevant to the alleged license violation). Gavin replied by bringing the focus back to the LGPL issue, stating that "Genuitec have decided not to comply with [LGPL] restriction". The ball went back to Genuitec's court and the response is a little surprising, to say the least:

Given their history, I cannot help but fault Genuitec for assuming that providing our source code changes to the Hibernate team would motivate them to accept the enhancements and thereby make the changes public. For that poor assumption, shame on us. We provided the source to all our modification, in good faith, directly to them when they were made. However, since they chose to discard our enhancements, our changes are technically not available to others. But insinuating that we don't comply with their license, or haven't attempted to comply by providing the modified source to them, is extremely disingenuous.

Here is what i read in plain English:

• Genuitec indeed took LGPL code and modified it.
• Genuitec then contacted Hibernate dev team and sent them the modified code.
• Hibernate dev team decided to not accept this code.
• Genuitec proceeded putting this code into their own offering, without releasing the modified code as stipulated by the terms of LGPL

Now, the first three are regular business practice (doesn't matter if you're an open-source or a commercial vendor). Genuitec's business is to provide one-stop-shop for popular technologies. Obviously, Hibernate is one of the leaders in its space, so it's a good candidate for inclusion in MyEclipse offering. Genuitec obviously tries to minimize its overhead by introducing some kind of generic layer. Having made some changes to Hibernate code, they contacted Hibernate team and offered the code back. Hibernate doesn't owe Genuitec much (all those tens of thousands of calls and downloads served both sides, making MyEclipse one of the leading products in its field, so Genuitec shouldn't use these numbers to picture themselves martyrs). For whatever reasons, Hibernate team has decided to reject the code. It has all the right in the world to do so, there's nothing in the license that requires the original codebase to assimilate any outside change.

At this point, Genuitec had the following options:

• Drop the changes they made to Hibernate codebase.
• Change their own code to LGPL and release all of it.
• Refactor the specific changes to a separate module, change the license of that module to LGPL and release the source to the general public as soon as the binaries were made available.

As far as i can tell, none of this happened up until today. Both parties agree that it has taken between 12 to 18 months, Genuitec acknowledges that the code was sent privately to the original developers (and not shipped with MyEclipse binaries / made available on the public website), and Hibernate even alleges that even the module that has now been released under LGPL doesn't constitute a separate body of work (but that's not for me to say).

Somehow, Genuitec tries to shift the blame on to Hibernate. So, you've sent the code and it's been rejected. It's not enough, not according to LGPL. The minute the binaries were available to MyEclipse customers (doesn't matter if they are paying or not), the code should have been made publicly available (at least circa August 2006 when MyEclipse 5.0.1 was released). You can spin it all you want, but for quite some time, the licensing terms have been knowingly violated.

I'm not sure how David and Goliath story fits here. Who's David? Who's Goliath? Wasn't David this witty cunning guy who employed a kind of shady apparatus to beat the other guy (who, on the other hand, would have tried to use his physical traits to his advantage)? But i digress.

A little disclaimer. I have nothing connecting me to any one of these two parties. I've never used Hibernate (ducks), we have an in-house tool to do that, and i've written my share of ODBC / JDBC. I've never used MyEclipse (ducks) as well. I'm also not a free software zealot, in fact almost all of my java.net projects are BSD (Substance module for NetBeans is under CDDL since it was developped on top of the NetBeans code). But i do understand the reasoning behind moving to GPL in this case.

Last thing - it may be only temporary, but at the present time, the download page is not directly accessible from the main MyEclipse page (which also doesn't seem to have a search link, but maybe i'm missing something). In addition, searching for both "Hibernate" and "Open Source" / "Open Source Resources" doesn't seem to produce a link to the above page.

Showing licenses for your application

    
LicenseDialog licenseDialog = new LicenseDialog(
  ownerFrame,      // your application frame
  "JAXB Workshop", // library name
  new LicenseDialog.LibraryDetails(
    "https://jaxb-workshop.dev.java.net/", // library URL
    LicenseDialog.LicenseType.BSD,         // license enum
    "license/bsd_license.txt"));           // resource name for license text

     
licenseDialog.addNewRootLibrary(
  "SJSXP",  // library name
  new LicenseDialog.LibraryDetails(
    "https://sjsxp.dev.java.net/",                   // library URL
    "Sun BCL",                                       // license abbreviation
    "Sun Binary Code License",                       // license full name 
    LicenseDialog.LicenseType.getLicenseIcon("10"),  // icon for license entry in the tree
    "license/sun_bcl_license.txt"));                 // resource name for license text

     
licenseDialog.addNewChildLibrary(
    "JUNG",                   // parent library name
    "Commons Collections",    // library name
    new LicenseDialog.LibraryDetails(
      "http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/collections/",   // library URL
      LicenseDialog.LicenseType.APACHE2,                  // license enum
      "license/apache2_license.txt"));                    // resource name for license text

     
licenseDialog.expandAll(true);
licenseDialog.setLicenseTextAreaFont(
   new Font("Tahoma", Font.PLAIN, 12));

     
Dimension dim = new Dimension(800, 600);
licenseDialog.setSize(dim);
licenseDialog.setPreferredSize(dim);
licenseDialog.setResizable(false);
licenseDialog.pack();
licenseDialog.setLocation(...);
licenseDialog.setVisible(true);

Eclipse - the milk cow for the board members

What's your top 3 open-source choice?

1. JUnit
2. Tomcat
3. Struts

Open source - the curse of the abundance

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.