[Wrapper-user] Licensing Comments (was: Completely aghast at new licensing terms)

[Leif M. <le...@ta...>]

Milton,
Thank you for your honest feedback.  We realize and
expected that not all users would be initially positive about
the changes to the Wrapper's License.   But we feel that in
the long run, this will make the Wrapper a much stronger
product both for our Commercial and Open Source user
base.

The Wrapper has from the beginning been open source
and the Community Edition will continue to be so.  We
appreciate your kind praise of the Wrapper and will make
every effort to continue to live up to your expectations.

1) License

Older versions of the Java Service Wrapper were released
under a very liberal license which placed no restrictions on
how the Wrapper was used by our users.

Tanuki Software has always treated the Wrapper as a core
technology and done our best to support, document, develop,
and test it as we would a commercial product.  This has
resulted in a stable and flexible tool which has gained wide
acceptance.

As you are surely aware, providing any quality software
product comes at a significant cost in both time and money.
The Wrapper is a culmination of several years of work.  With
the Wrapper remaining a purely open source product, Tanuki
Software was not receiving near enough revenue to justify a
high level of new development.

In the interest of continuing to improve the Wrapper to meet
the needs of our large user base we decided to offer commercial
Editions in ADDITION to the community Edition.   This new
revenue stream has enabled us to directly fund Wrapper
development.  Which will result in a much more vital application.

We realize that the change to a GPL2 license for the Community
Edition has added restrictions to how and where the Community
Edition can be used.  While the GPL is not perfect, the goal here
is to provide a solution that will enable open source projects to
continue to use the Wrapper, while at the same time allow for a
viable business model and thus support its development.  This
is a model very similar to what MySQL has done.

We have not yet implemented a FLOSS license like MySQL has
which enables MySQL to be used with many non-GPL OSS licenses,
but we have no intention to encumber purely OSS projects and
will work to come up with a fair solution to this problem.

2) Community Involvement

You are correct that we did not make a wide spread
announcement of these business plans to the Wrapper community
at large until just before the 3.3.0 release.  However we have
been communicating with several of our long time users over the
last year attempting to get a feel for how these changes would
affect their businesses and projects.

3) Feature Set

When we designed the 3 Editions of the Wrapper we were
very conscious of our long time user base.   The 3.3.0
Community Edition of the Wrapper contains ALL of the
features that were available in the 3.2.3 release.  Plus a
number of new features and bug fixes.

The Commercial Standard and Professional Editions of the
Wrapper contain all of the features available in the Community
Edition plus several additional features that are completely
new to 3.3.0.

Once again, there were NO features removed from the
Community Edition of the Wrapper as you claim.

We will be continuing to implement features in the Community
of Wrapper, but will of course also be adding features that will
be initially available to the commercial editions.

Any patches or code which is submitted by the user base and
accepted by Tanuki Software will of course be available in the
Community Edition.

If you have any concerns about specific features, please feel
free to contact me directly or on list.

4) Pricing

The Pricing for the Wrapper is something that came out of
analysis of our costs to maintain the product, the market for
similar tools, and feedback from users.  The development
licenses are extremely flexible and unrestrictive to allow our
customers to use the Wrapper at will within their products.
If the current pricing does not fit into your business model,
for example if you sell to a very small number of customers
and provide a low cost product it may be possible to
arrange a restricted version of the development license to
meet your needs.   Please feel free contact
sa...@ta... to discuss those terms.

5) Branching

Branching the Wrapper has always been possible, though
the license and code do require that relevant copyright
notices always be made available in any such branches.

It is very rare however that an OSS project is successfully
branched unless the goals of the two projects each satisfy
respective divergent needs.

The Wrapper also continues to be actively developed and is
offered at a price that is much less than the resources that
would be required by any 3rd party to duplicate these
efforts.

As stated above, we have also made every effort to come up
with a solution that is fair to our OSS user base while at the
same time providing the funding required to maintain the
project's vitality.   Efforts by the OSS community in effect take
advantage of the OSS licenses to work around our business
model would have the obvious and unfortunate effect of
discouraging companies like Tanuki Software from continuing
to invest in OSS.

We have of course always been aware of this possibility, and
will rely on our continued development and support efforts
to continue to provide value to you and the rest of our users.

We look forward to any further feedback you might have.

Sincerely,
Leif Mortenson,
Tanuki Software, Inc.


Milton Taylor wrote:
> Q. So when is Open Source not open source?
> A. When the copyright owner changes their mind!
>
>  From the Tanuki JSR web-site, and still on display:
> /"The Wrapper, being an open source application, is free and will always
> remain free. "/   Cheap words in hindsight?
>
> I like many others use the Tanuki Java Service Wrapper because it is a
> great solution to a common problem.
>
> I actually don't have a problem with paying some sort of license fee for
> is use, but for something like this, I need to be able to build it into
> my installer, and I'm not going to go to the bother of creating a
> different installer for each target host etc, hence the only version of
> JSR that appears relevant is the Developer version. There is no way I
> can justify paying thousands of dollars for a developer license for this
> piece of work, as useful as it is. Nor could I justify the hassle of
> administering a per-host/per-customer license. Sorry!
>
> What I really object to is the fact that features that were previously
> part of the (true) Open-Source version have now been classified as
> "Professional Features", i.e. the free version is now the functionally
> crippled one. I also think you have done yourself a great dis-service by
> not consulting with your users about what you planned to do. (I don't 
> see any prior discussion about this in the mail archive)
>
> So, I guess we're either stuck with version 3.2.3 - unable to
> legitimately obtain the fixes available in 3.3.0 - or we switch to
> something else.
>
> Or, someone creates a true open-source fork as of 3.2.3 and we all carry
> on from there.
>
> Yours in disgruntlement...
> mctozzy
>
>
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