[Drawkit] DrawKit licensing hassles

[Steve Weller]

On Sep 22, 2008, at 5:15 AM, Bill Dudney wrote:

> Snip
>
> If on the other hand you want to be the sole prop owner of the code  
> and not have contributors (not that I'm suggest that is what you  
> want) then a more restrictive license would be good. The owner of  
> the code maintains exclusive control over the code and the community  
> is built up as 'users' not contributors. This is the model followed  
> by JBoss and other high profile open source projects. Nothing wrong  
> with this approach, it is just more focused on building a company  
> around the open source project than about building a community of  
> developers around the project.


Note that Marc Fleury sold JBoss to Red Hat for $350m. He made all the  
money he needed to get there from support  (and he certainly needed it  
-- he was living in the SF Bay area until he ran out of his own funds).
http://atlanta.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2006/04/24/story7.html?page=1

But it was not all plain sailing: legal issues over code ownership  
held things up significantly when he talked to buyers: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Database/If-Legal-Questions-Killed-an-OracleJBoss-Deal-Why-Not-Red-HatJBoss/

So if you ever plan on making a serious run with DrawKit, you better  
have things straight early on, certainly before you accept  
contributions. Middleware is a good market to be in. It brings  
together a combination of skills and tools that few customers have.  
You'll find a small number of big customers and that makes it possible  
to provide support and keep them.


Steve Weller   bagelturf at mac.com
Technical Writing, Editing, Developer Guides, and a little Cocoa