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mboudreau / Alternator

A mock DynamoDB that runs locally for testing purposes - DEPRECATED, PLEASE USE DYNAMODB LOCAL: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/DynamoDBLocal.html
Apache License 2.0
78 stars 39 forks source link

Licence #62

Closed stewartallen closed 11 years ago

stewartallen commented 11 years ago

Hi,

I would love to use Alternator in a project I'm working on. There is one problem though. I see you have specified the licence as GPL v3 in the pom.xml file. As far as I can see this is the only place you specify the licence. I can not use GPL V3 licensed software Is there any chance to maybe change this to GPL 2.0 or Apache

mboudreau commented 11 years ago

You bring up a good point. I'm no legal expert, but I'm curious as to why you can't use GPL v3 in your project?

I will be reviewing licenses and see what would be best for everyone. The whole point of this project is to have everyone use and contribute to it without restrictions.

stewartallen commented 11 years ago

As far as I understand it it's got to do with granting patent protection to derived work. I've just been asked to avoid using any v3.0 software. I'm not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination.

mboudreau commented 11 years ago

Okay, are you thinking that you are going to patent a technology that is derived from my and other contributors work?

This is a testing platform and shouldn't be used as a production service. It's meant to be a tool to help you test your software locally instead of using DynamoDB. I think GPL v3, with patent protection, is actually a good one to use because it stops people from patenting software that is meant to be open source, or owned by someone else.

You can use it to test your own software, but you cannot use it to be a core part of your system.

On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 7:11 PM, Stewart notifications@github.com wrote:

As far as I understand it it's got to do with granting patent protection to derived work. I've just been asked to avoid using any v3.0 software.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/mboudreau/Alternator/issues/62#issuecomment-16374383 .

Michel Boudreau

"If at first you don't succeed, use a bigger hammer." - Unofficial motto of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers

stewartallen commented 11 years ago

No, it's to stop me having to protect derived works from my code. If I use v3.0 in my code, all my code has to be v3 licenced even if it's just unit testing code.

If someone used my code and gets sued for some patent issue I could end up having to help protect them or something like that.

I have no interest in closing or patenting anything. I completely understand if you are against this change, I just thought I'd ask and see.

mboudreau commented 11 years ago

I don't think that's how licensing works, that you have to change your whole code to the same license because you use a tool.

Either way, I've looked at options and I think OSL might be the best fit: http://opensource.org/licenses/osl-3.0.php

What do you think?

On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 7:25 PM, Stewart notifications@github.com wrote:

No, it's to stop me having to protect derived works from my code. If I use v3.0 in my code, all my code has to be v3 licenced even if it's just unit testing code.

If someone used my code and gets sued for some patent issue I could end up having to help protect them. OR something like that.

I have no interest in closing or patenting anything

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/mboudreau/Alternator/issues/62#issuecomment-16374944 .

Michel Boudreau

"If at first you don't succeed, use a bigger hammer." - Unofficial motto of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers

stewartallen commented 11 years ago

Yea I probably didn't understand the lawyer speak.

I've asked and OSL is prohibited too. No reason given. Most licences are allowed. The following are not allowed:

Affero General Public License (AGPL) 1.0 Common Public Attribution License Version (CPAL) 1.0 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC-NC) 1.0, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0 GNU Lesser General Public License (GNU LGPL) 3.0 GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) 3.0 Honest Public License (HPL) 1.0 Open Software License (OSL) 3.0 RealNetworks Public Source License 1.0 University of Wisconsin Web Cache Simulator License

mboudreau commented 11 years ago

Yeah, I'm sorry, but either the lawyer doesn't understand software or that your company has put in place ridiculous restrictions to prevent any potential legal repercussions (which wouldn't happen either way). I've worked for a company of the latter, and the whole place was run by lawyer. I didn't stay there long.

My recommendation would be to get "inspired" by the code and create your own with some key changes. It's the only way I could get around the lawyers back then ("Yeah, I created all this code from scratch").

Good luck.

On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 7:43 PM, Stewart notifications@github.com wrote:

Yea I probably didn't understand the lawyer speak.

I've asked and OSL is prohibited too. No reason given. Most licences are allowed. The following are not allowed:

Affero General Public License (AGPL) 1.0 Common Public Attribution License Version (CPAL) 1.0 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC-NC) 1.0, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0 GNU Lesser General Public License (GNU LGPL) 3.0 GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) 3.0 Honest Public License (HPL) 1.0 Open Software License (OSL) 3.0 RealNetworks Public Source License 1.0 University of Wisconsin Web Cache Simulator License

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/mboudreau/Alternator/issues/62#issuecomment-16375688 .

Michel Boudreau

"If at first you don't succeed, use a bigger hammer." - Unofficial motto of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers

stewartallen commented 11 years ago

Thanks for your time. I guess it's back to jmock :)

rrutt commented 11 years ago

Our software engineering team had similar concerns about the GPL (as opposed to LGPL) license.

This is one of the reasons I added the Maven 'standalone' profile. When Maven is run with this profile, it creates a standalone JAR file that can be run in its own process using the java.exe JVM.

None of the Alternator source code is ever used by or included in your "application under development". You simply configure a different endpoint URL http://localhost:9090/ into the Amazon DynamoDb client. With the actual Amazon client, you will have to supply valid AWS credentials, but they are only used for the initial connection. After that all interaction is between your application process and the separate Alternator process. You are calling a service exposed by a third-party tool on your local workstation. None of the Alternator source code "contaminates" your application, so the GPL restrictions do not apply to your own code.

(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.)

inder123 commented 11 years ago

I respectfully request the Alternator team to reconsider its decision and switch to LGPL type of license (if not ASL). Alternator is faster as an embedded server in JUnit tests. Forcing users to switch to suboptimal integrations just because of licensing seems silly.

stewartallen commented 11 years ago

Any of the Apache licences would be great. It really sucks when your hands are tied.

mboudreau commented 11 years ago

Thanks for all your input guys. Let me look over the Apache license and get back to you all.

inder123 commented 11 years ago

Thanks mboudreau for being open to changing the license. IMHO, Apache license is best because it allows other open source projects (GPL, LGPL, ASL, etc.) to freely reuse the code as well. With GPL, only GPL open-source projects can use your code.

In my experiences with Gson (which I am a coauthor of, and which is released under ASL), it is actually good to have lots of commercial users for broad acceptance and reach. No one can really keep up or has the cycles to build/maintain their own fork. Most of your user-base is (AWS/DynamoDB users) are likely commercial users. Why not go for maximum adoption?

mboudreau commented 11 years ago

Agreed. Apache it is. Gimme time to change things and add a license.txt file in the repo and then deploy. On 2013-04-16 10:13 AM, "inder123" notifications@github.com wrote:

Thanks mboudreau for being open to changing the license. IMHO, Apache license is best because it allows other open source projects (GPL, LGPL, ASL, etc.) to freely reuse the code as well. With GPL, only GPL open-source projects can use your code.

In my experiences with Gson (which I am a coauthor of, and which is released under ASL), it is actually good to have lots of commercial users for broad acceptance and reach. No one can really keep up or has the cycles to build/maintain their own fork. Most of your user-base is (AWS/DynamoDB users) are likely commercial users. Why not go for maximum adoption?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/mboudreau/Alternator/issues/62#issuecomment-16419276 .

inder123 commented 11 years ago

Awesome! Thank you.

stewartallen commented 11 years ago

Brilliant thanks very much

mboudreau commented 11 years ago

Guys, I've updated the code and last night I've pushed the latest version to the sonatype repo: 0.5.0 - improved with Apache license.

Cheers and thanks for all your input.