Maidenhead, UK-based Alfresco has previously used a modified version of the Mozilla Public License known as the Alfresco Public License, which dictated how developers building on the code had to display the company’s name and logo in attribution.
According to the company’s VP of business development, Matt Asay, it will likely be the first of several companies to abandon ‘attribution licenses’ in favor of the GPL, which is used for three quarters of all open source projects.
The writing’s on the wall that it’s going to be heavily modified and diluted in terms of what it allows or is designed to allow, said Asay of an ongoing debate about attribution licenses within the Open Source Initiative.
Attribution licenses are one of several things that divide open source community members, with some confusion as to whether they constitute OSI-approved licenses or not due to the fact that they build on the OSI-approved MPL.
OSI president Michael Tiemann last month challenged supporters on both sides to come up with coherent arguments on enterprise wiki vendor Socialtext’s attribution license, which was submitted top the OSI for approval in November 2006.
While Tiemann gave OSI license mailing list subscribers until the end of February to get a coherent debate going, Asay believes that the attribution license’s days are numbered. Attribution is going to survive in a somewhat limited form, he said. Most people just don’t want to put up with it.
While that is a good reason for the company to have turned to the GPL, Asay also maintained that it is his belief that the GPL does a better job of encouraging attribution and contribution, either in the form of support revenues or code development.
The problem with application companies is there’s no protection for you, he said, noting that there is more opportunity at the application level than the operating system level for developers to pick up code and turn it into something else.
While the GPL does not prevent developers from doing that, it does mean that they are required to publish any code they distribute under the GPL, ensuring any modifications remain open.
According to Asay, this is a more elegant method of retaining attribution than dictating to developers how they use and display a trademarked logo in any modified code. He explained that it was understandable why several open source start-ups took up the MPL+ Attribution approach, however.
As a company we didn’t feel comfortable that we had the brand that would push people to buy support from us, he said. It’s really, really hard to take that leap of faith that you’re providing the value that people will buy from you.
For open source code that does not already use the GPL, such as the Apache middleware projects, Alfresco has come up with an exception that prevents developers having to publish their code under the GPL so long as they are using an Open Source Initiative-approved license.
The company also continues to offer its code under OEM and commercial licenses to business users, ISVs and VARs.
Building on the content management expertise co-founders John Newton, co-founder of Documentum, and John Powell, former COO of Business Objects, Alfresco has expanded rapidly over the past two years and has version 2.0 of its Community product, the first to use the GPL.
Alfresco 2.0 includes the company’s first foray into the web content management space, as well as federated search and document and records management enhancements and is being pitched as a bridge between the old and new content management worlds.
We bring the stability of Documentum and the front office functionality of SharePoint, said Asay. We’re the bridge between the two.
