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It's not a trivial anecdote when you can say that the GPL brought a project back to life, because that's what it did. New, active, non-umich developers -- who

It's not a trivial anecdote when you can say that the GPL brought a project back to life, because that's what it did. New, active, non-umich developers -- who also happened to favor the GPL for personal/political reasons -- brought the project back to life. Not the GPL. The project stagnated because AppleTalk ceased to be used, and AFP over TCP was generally replaced in most corporate installations by Windows Fileshares or WebDAV, and UMich didn't need it anymore -- not because corporate interests were stealing contributor's labor. It's presumptuous to take a product that was entirely and successfully developed for years under the BSD license and then claim it as a GPL success story because the new maintainers had a moral imperative to relicense. You wouldn't claim it a success story for their coding style if they also decided to switch to 4 character tabs and newlines before braces.

Scramblejams 17y ago
"New, active, non-umich developers brought the project back to life. Not the GPL." While we're being pedantic, I'll note, completely unnecessarily for our thinking readers, that the GPL was necessary but not sufficient. "The project stagnated because AppleTalk ceased to be used, and AFP over TCP was generally replaced in most corporate installations by Windows Fileshares or WebDAV." That's an interesting assertion. No one could plausibly argue that the situation today is any different. And yet the project is alive and kicking. You can try to explain why in a way which obviates the license, but the reality is that for the players who showed up to the game, the BSD license was a deal breaker. "It's not the GPL!", you say. "It's that the developers preferred it!" Fine. But if your license drives off all your developers, justifiably or not, whether it's morally superior or not, your license has killed the project. Period. Me? I'd rather choose a license that the developers like. So they, you know: develop.
- antonovka 17y ago
  You can try to explain why in a way which obviates the license, but the reality is that for the players who showed up to the game, the BSD license was a deal breaker. "It's not the GPL!", you say. "It's that the developers preferred it!" Fine. But if your license drives off all your developers, justifiably or not, whether it's morally superior or not, your license has killed the project. Period. The fact that your missing is that the once-successful project was already dead because the primary authors no longer required it and the technology landscape had changed, not because the BSD licensed was used. Given that, I agree that the "correct" license was whatever license anyone actually willing to contribute wanted. The fact that the few new developers interested in contributing were GPL proponents is entirely happenstance and not a success story -- the project reached full maturity with years of development under the BSD license!
  - Scramblejams 17y ago
    "The fact that your missing is that the once-successful project was already dead because the primary authors no longer required it and the technology landscape had changed, not because the BSD licensed was used." "The project reached full maturity with years of development under the BSD license!" Wrong, wrong, wrong. Absolutely wrong. You said that Netatalk in its UMich days was "once successful" and "fully mature," and that its previous users didn't need to maintain it anymore. Neither of those assertions are true. Fully mature? Reference my earlier post on CNIDs (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=799429 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=799429), but there were grave data-loss and severe locking bugs in Netatalk which persisted from as far back in its BSD heyday as I can recall. In addition, the build scripts were all kinds of broken, and enabling a basic security feature like DHX was sometimes the subject of long web HOWTOs, due to how fraught the software was. Before the project came back to life, I recommended other options to my clients not because Netatalk's function wasn't necessary, but because Netatalk wasn't trustworthy. (Fortunately a few motivated developers wrote the CDB and DBD backends, and the problem disappeared.) And the idea that its primary users didn't need to maintain it? Hogwash! Not only were many of the major storage vendors continually shipping it in their devices, but they were shipping privately maintained forks of it with fixes for the issues I mentioned. So it _was_ being maintained, but UMich's source tree was out of luck. The BSD license is why they didn't contribute the fixes back, because they didn't have to. And so Netatalk, always kinda broken, stayed kinda broken. (Yes, Netatalk is pretty much the poster child for BSD projects which have been sorely neglected by their Fortune 500 users. IIRC, Quantum was the sole exception, but don't quote me on that.) Now, it's reasonable to propose that if Netatalk had had a GPL license from the beginning, storage vendors might not have adopted it. But vendors ship tens of thousands of units every month running the GPL'd version, so it wouldn't hold water. In addition, there's no need to link to Netatalk in order to build an administration interface around it, something their developers and lawyers have surely always known.
    - antonovka 17y ago
      Wrong, wrong, wrong. Absolutely wrong. You said that Netatalk in its UMich days was "once successful" and "fully mature," and that its previous users didn't need to maintain it anymore. Neither of those assertions are true. Fully mature? Reference my earlier post on CNIDs I never ran into the CNID issue when using Netatalk on our Mac OS 8 systems. By the time Mac OS 9/Mac OS X came around, the project's necessity was already diminishing and I (like many others) had long since stopped paying attention. I seem to recall contributing all of one patch to netatalk, and that wasn't because I was an evil corporate code stealer -- we just didn't need an AFP server anymore. Fortunately a few motivated developers wrote the CDB and DBD backends, and the problem disappeared. The BSD license is why they didn't contribute the fixes back, because they didn't have to. Vendors had absolutely no reason to use a GPL fork unless new contributors then implemented considerable useful code under the GPL. In other words, making it GPL wasn't the magic that got vendors to use the GPL'd software, providing them more value for free did the trick. But vendors ship tens of thousands of units every month running the GPL'd version, so it wouldn't hold water. How many of those actually significantly contribute back to the project? I count three active committers.
Scramblejams 17y ago
By the way, I just have to take issue with this: "It's presumptuous to take a product that was entirely and successfully developed for years under the BSD license and then claim it as a GPL success story because the new maintainers had a moral imperative to relicense." Something to remember is that the key pain point at this stage of Netatalk's development was that its CNID scheme -- the method by which the server gives a unique identifier to each file/directory and refers to it when communicating with the client -- was broken and frequently led to silent data loss when the server would mistakenly reuse IDs. This problem was well-known and well-understood. And nobody -- certainly not the big companies who'd fixed the problem in their private forks -- would step up to fix it. In this context, it's very hard to truthfully characterize Netatalk as "successfully developed for years under the BSD license." A file server in widespread production use with a well-known data integrity problem? That no one will fix? Call it what you like, but that ain't a healthy project.
- antonovka 17y ago
  You can trump this up however you want to, but how do you weigh your anecdote of a small, abandoned project that now has three active contributors, compared with another University Michigan open source project that underwent a similar transformation -- UMich-LDAP. UMich LDAP was developed under a BSD-like license. The project stagnated with serious issues that were not fixed. Maintainership was then acquired, the project became OpenLDAP, and it remains highly successful to this day under a liberal BSD-like license, and is even incorporated into commercial products like Apple's Open Directory? Same original maintainer (umich), same open source maintenance abandonment, better outcome (incredibly widespread use and active development), different license (liberal).
  - Scramblejams 17y ago
    Haha, I never said the BSD license couldn't be used successfully. Now I just think you're trolling. The project looks like it's in fine health to me... http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=686071&group_id=8642 http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=6860...

Scramblejams 17y ago

"New, active, non-umich developers brought the project back to life. Not the GPL." While we're being pedantic, I'll note, completely unnecessarily for our thinking readers, that the GPL was necessary but not sufficient. "The project stagnated because AppleTalk ceased to be used, and AFP over TCP was generally replaced in most corporate installations by Windows Fileshares or WebDAV." That's an interesting assertion. No one could plausibly argue that the situation today is any different. And yet the project is alive and kicking. You can try to explain why in a way which obviates the license, but the reality is that for the players who showed up to the game, the BSD license was a deal breaker. "It's not the GPL!", you say. "It's that the developers preferred it!" Fine. But if your license drives off all your developers, justifiably or not, whether it's morally superior or not, your license has killed the project. Period. Me? I'd rather choose a license that the developers like. So they, you know: develop.

antonovka 17y ago
You can try to explain why in a way which obviates the license, but the reality is that for the players who showed up to the game, the BSD license was a deal breaker. "It's not the GPL!", you say. "It's that the developers preferred it!" Fine. But if your license drives off all your developers, justifiably or not, whether it's morally superior or not, your license has killed the project. Period. The fact that your missing is that the once-successful project was already dead because the primary authors no longer required it and the technology landscape had changed, not because the BSD licensed was used. Given that, I agree that the "correct" license was whatever license anyone actually willing to contribute wanted. The fact that the few new developers interested in contributing were GPL proponents is entirely happenstance and not a success story -- the project reached full maturity with years of development under the BSD license!
- Scramblejams 17y ago
  "The fact that your missing is that the once-successful project was already dead because the primary authors no longer required it and the technology landscape had changed, not because the BSD licensed was used." "The project reached full maturity with years of development under the BSD license!" Wrong, wrong, wrong. Absolutely wrong. You said that Netatalk in its UMich days was "once successful" and "fully mature," and that its previous users didn't need to maintain it anymore. Neither of those assertions are true. Fully mature? Reference my earlier post on CNIDs (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=799429 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=799429), but there were grave data-loss and severe locking bugs in Netatalk which persisted from as far back in its BSD heyday as I can recall. In addition, the build scripts were all kinds of broken, and enabling a basic security feature like DHX was sometimes the subject of long web HOWTOs, due to how fraught the software was. Before the project came back to life, I recommended other options to my clients not because Netatalk's function wasn't necessary, but because Netatalk wasn't trustworthy. (Fortunately a few motivated developers wrote the CDB and DBD backends, and the problem disappeared.) And the idea that its primary users didn't need to maintain it? Hogwash! Not only were many of the major storage vendors continually shipping it in their devices, but they were shipping privately maintained forks of it with fixes for the issues I mentioned. So it _was_ being maintained, but UMich's source tree was out of luck. The BSD license is why they didn't contribute the fixes back, because they didn't have to. And so Netatalk, always kinda broken, stayed kinda broken. (Yes, Netatalk is pretty much the poster child for BSD projects which have been sorely neglected by their Fortune 500 users. IIRC, Quantum was the sole exception, but don't quote me on that.) Now, it's reasonable to propose that if Netatalk had had a GPL license from the beginning, storage vendors might not have adopted it. But vendors ship tens of thousands of units every month running the GPL'd version, so it wouldn't hold water. In addition, there's no need to link to Netatalk in order to build an administration interface around it, something their developers and lawyers have surely always known.
  - antonovka 17y ago
    Wrong, wrong, wrong. Absolutely wrong. You said that Netatalk in its UMich days was "once successful" and "fully mature," and that its previous users didn't need to maintain it anymore. Neither of those assertions are true. Fully mature? Reference my earlier post on CNIDs I never ran into the CNID issue when using Netatalk on our Mac OS 8 systems. By the time Mac OS 9/Mac OS X came around, the project's necessity was already diminishing and I (like many others) had long since stopped paying attention. I seem to recall contributing all of one patch to netatalk, and that wasn't because I was an evil corporate code stealer -- we just didn't need an AFP server anymore. Fortunately a few motivated developers wrote the CDB and DBD backends, and the problem disappeared. The BSD license is why they didn't contribute the fixes back, because they didn't have to. Vendors had absolutely no reason to use a GPL fork unless new contributors then implemented considerable useful code under the GPL. In other words, making it GPL wasn't the magic that got vendors to use the GPL'd software, providing them more value for free did the trick. But vendors ship tens of thousands of units every month running the GPL'd version, so it wouldn't hold water. How many of those actually significantly contribute back to the project? I count three active committers.

Scramblejams 17y ago

By the way, I just have to take issue with this: "It's presumptuous to take a product that was entirely and successfully developed for years under the BSD license and then claim it as a GPL success story because the new maintainers had a moral imperative to relicense." Something to remember is that the key pain point at this stage of Netatalk's development was that its CNID scheme -- the method by which the server gives a unique identifier to each file/directory and refers to it when communicating with the client -- was broken and frequently led to silent data loss when the server would mistakenly reuse IDs. This problem was well-known and well-understood. And nobody -- certainly not the big companies who'd fixed the problem in their private forks -- would step up to fix it. In this context, it's very hard to truthfully characterize Netatalk as "successfully developed for years under the BSD license." A file server in widespread production use with a well-known data integrity problem? That no one will fix? Call it what you like, but that ain't a healthy project.

antonovka 17y ago
You can trump this up however you want to, but how do you weigh your anecdote of a small, abandoned project that now has three active contributors, compared with another University Michigan open source project that underwent a similar transformation -- UMich-LDAP. UMich LDAP was developed under a BSD-like license. The project stagnated with serious issues that were not fixed. Maintainership was then acquired, the project became OpenLDAP, and it remains highly successful to this day under a liberal BSD-like license, and is even incorporated into commercial products like Apple's Open Directory? Same original maintainer (umich), same open source maintenance abandonment, better outcome (incredibly widespread use and active development), different license (liberal).
- Scramblejams 17y ago
  Haha, I never said the BSD license couldn't be used successfully. Now I just think you're trolling. The project looks like it's in fine health to me... http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=686071&group_id=8642 http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=6860...