Open Source Madness or People are stealing Mayan EDMS. | Hacker News Reader

Open Source Madness or People are stealing Mayan EDMS.

orangethirty.blogspot.com

5 pointsorangethirty8 comments

If you fork Mayan EDMS into a closed or private respository, stop and think about what you are doing because you going about it the wrong way. Likewise if you fork Mayan EDMS and the first patch you commit is to change the name, stop.

Both of those are allowed under the GPL. See http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/61038 for the former, and the latter is allowed under just about any open source license so long as you adhere with the rest of the terms; in fact, that's the pre-GitHub definition of a "project fork". Under the GPL, others are even free to sell your software as long as they link/ship the source code (probably not what's happening in your case, but I'm mentioning that anyway for the sake of discussion).

How will this affect the future of Mayan EDMS? It is too early to tell, what is certain is that the latest technologies being added to Mayan EDMS must be protected until they are ready to be released.

I might be biased because anything I write is MIT/BSD-licensed, but I don't understand why the fact that there's a few "unauthorized" forks of your project out there is deterring you from continuing working on it. Chances are, those forks have not a single user, and even if they do, so what?

I'm not opposed to the forks, there are 31 forks in github alone. My gripe is with at least three fork, two being distributed under different names and whose only patches are a name changed. Those may not be illegal, but are unnecessary and unethical. The last fork is being distributed with just a simple change of name also but being sold and no instruction or apparent source code is being distributed.

"If you are distributing the software, your responsibilities kick in."

You make fair points. My personal opinion is that we do have a license issue pending. There is an un-written gentleman's (gentle person) agreement about open source software, where there is a minimum amount of respect towards other peoples work. This is my biggest gripe here. I feel the spirit of this is being violated. The project was started about two years ago, and Roberto never thought it would reach this point. As much as we love the GPL, I think its time to move on.

Thanks for posting, I'm the creator of Mayan EDMS and while stealing Open Source software sounds like and oxymoron, it can and it does happen. In some cases is just avoidance of the terms set in the license in other cases, such in the case of Mayan EDMS they are just plain and blatantly selling the code under another name!

Then you should have chosen a license that doesn't explicitly allow that. Like the previous poster said, this is perfectly fine under the GPL as long as they provide the source code and since it is in Python I assume that they do.

There are several ways to compile Python. But point taken, will think about drafting a specific license to avoid situations like this in the future.

It sounds a bit like you didn't actually want to open source this code at all. Open Source isn't, "Look, I am giving away my hard work for free." Open Source means you give people the opportunity to build on top of your work. This is how things evolve. If everyone has to start from square one every time they have an idea for improving something they use it would slow everything down. And yes, it means you will effectively end up competing with your own code for mindshare and users, but presumably that doesn't frighten you. As long as they abide by the terms of the license and let others to the same they are in the same boat. If someone else does a better job improving the code, marketing it, providing support, etc. more power to them. Chances are if your version is the best supported contributions will flow back to you.

I personally prefer BSD-style licenses. I don't mind commercial competition at all.

And I give the people the freedom to do with the code as they please, as long as they follow the terms of the license. And I don't mind commercial competition, in fact I promote it right in the website: http://rosarior.github.com/mayan/support.html

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