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re: > Immediately I sense that if wallaroo labs goes bankrupt / is bought - the open source system can potentially become impossible to run legally in producti

re: > Immediately I sense that if wallaroo labs goes bankrupt / is bought - the open source system can potentially become impossible to run legally in production [ed: for new installations] ... You raise an interesting point. We'd be dealing with that with clients on a case by case basis of providing them with whatever assurances that they need should Wallaroo Labs disappear. However, we don't have anything stating that anywhere. The expectation that our lawyers had was that no company would sign a boilerplate contract so issues of "what happens if the company goes away" would be handled the agreement between us and that company. The basic story behind the custom license: 1- Outside of RedHat, there aren't a lot of companies who have shown you can build a successful growing business selling support. 2- We didn't want to have an open source product and a closed source commercial offering. We wanted anyone to be able to modify any of the code as they needed. We wanted to grant more rights than you normally see with open core projects. 3- We want to allow smaller companies to be able to use Wallaroo and all its features, thus the "free up to X" for enterprise features. This boils down to: 1) we don't think you can have a sustainable business as the primary developers of a infrastructure project where the model is selling support. 2) we want to make all source available and grant rights beyond what you would see with most open-core projects.

e12e 9y ago
From a business point of view, I understand the reasoning, but everyone wants everything for free ;-) I my concern is more that such a closed core/custom license doesn't bring with it the peace of mind that I usually associate with Free/OS software: that any work put into it, and any deployments (including future deployments) will be able to at least run on current code, regardless of licensing. And that was mostly an academic worry, until Oracle bought Sun, and demonstrated that companies would indeed do silly things to open software. Note that if it was Wallaroo that was "closed up", there'd be much more work and/or impossible to fork the system and continue using it. Sun with it's CDDL is also interesting for the problem wrt GPL incompatibility (which I think affects your license as well, (see: "Further Restrictions"). While I don't expect any of this code/system to run in the kernel, or inside some other system, like GCC - it is a (small) concern in terms of future use. It'll be interesting to see how this works out for you - I absolutely understand the need to monetize, and even if this is more of a "source available" license, than "Free Software" - it's still better than a completely closed system. But it'll never be distributed as part of eg: Debian/Main - like for example the jdk, or apache or spark is. I guess my main take-away is that this isn't "open source" but rather "source available" - because there's no way I can modify your software and sell/give/distribute it to someone and have them run it as and how they whish (Freedom zero). I don't mean this as criticism, but as an observation. [ed: On a more encouraging note, I know some big clients of Oracle/Solaris that were frustrated with the closed source offering, because there existed patches for problems on the open source OpenSolaris side for serious issues with big zfs deployments that took months to show up in the closed/supported offering from Oracle. So at least having a "transitive" license (if you have a license you can run community-improved code, not be bound to wait for upstream) is an improvement.] [ed2: Now, what happens when company X implements a similar license for compiler for language Z that is incorporated in Wallaroo (eg: APL/J, something new?) - but perhaps choose a different number of CPUs to trigger the need for a license? Could my system X-with-wallaroo require license fees from me to run at 12+ cpus, and from Wallaroo at 32+ cpus?). Just a thought.]
- spooneybarger 9y ago
  My personal email is in my profile. I'd be interested in chatting more because, I think that 1) you raise some legitimate points 2) some of your points we things we want to address and thought we had but might not be communicating well.

e12e 9y ago

From a business point of view, I understand the reasoning, but everyone wants everything for free ;-) I my concern is more that such a closed core/custom license doesn't bring with it the peace of mind that I usually associate with Free/OS software: that any work put into it, and any deployments (including future deployments) will be able to at least run on current code, regardless of licensing. And that was mostly an academic worry, until Oracle bought Sun, and demonstrated that companies would indeed do silly things to open software. Note that if it was Wallaroo that was "closed up", there'd be much more work and/or impossible to fork the system and continue using it. Sun with it's CDDL is also interesting for the problem wrt GPL incompatibility (which I think affects your license as well, (see: "Further Restrictions"). While I don't expect any of this code/system to run in the kernel, or inside some other system, like GCC - it is a (small) concern in terms of future use. It'll be interesting to see how this works out for you - I absolutely understand the need to monetize, and even if this is more of a "source available" license, than "Free Software" - it's still better than a completely closed system. But it'll never be distributed as part of eg: Debian/Main - like for example the jdk, or apache or spark is. I guess my main take-away is that this isn't "open source" but rather "source available" - because there's no way I can modify your software and sell/give/distribute it to someone and have them run it as and how they whish (Freedom zero). I don't mean this as criticism, but as an observation. [ed: On a more encouraging note, I know some big clients of Oracle/Solaris that were frustrated with the closed source offering, because there existed patches for problems on the open source OpenSolaris side for serious issues with big zfs deployments that took months to show up in the closed/supported offering from Oracle. So at least having a "transitive" license (if you have a license you can run community-improved code, not be bound to wait for upstream) is an improvement.] [ed2: Now, what happens when company X implements a similar license for compiler for language Z that is incorporated in Wallaroo (eg: APL/J, something new?) - but perhaps choose a different number of CPUs to trigger the need for a license? Could my system X-with-wallaroo require license fees from me to run at 12+ cpus, and from Wallaroo at 32+ cpus?). Just a thought.]

spooneybarger 9y ago
My personal email is in my profile. I'd be interested in chatting more because, I think that 1) you raise some legitimate points 2) some of your points we things we want to address and thought we had but might not be communicating well.