Thread

Correct me if I’m wrong, but under copyright law, a person automatically owns copyright to any work they create. Also, if those works are compiled into an anthology, they retain their copyright, they don’t lose it, they just allow it be published as a collective work.

If an author creates a new work based on some other work, an author must first obtain the rights to do so. For OSL (or the similar GPL) with termination clauses, if you break the license of the original work, you loose the rights to create a collective work as well.

You still have the copyright for your work, however, this is not helpful any longer to you when termination is in effect because you loose that (hopefully not important part) of the work you wanted to create.

As for being concerned… at the point where the license is actually active and I’m working on selling a product based on that, then yes, I’ll consult a lawyer.

Many of the CI users are selling. And next to that, copyright is not specifically about selling only. And the OSL is not as well.

For now, with the free code I give away, if the licensing gets challenged and I’m forced to change the license to OSL, that doens’t really impact the free code that I create and give away.

In case you created a derivative work, the OSL does impact the code that you created. You need to differ here, as any other developer. That’s the point, and then you’re contacting your lawyer again.

Whether it impacts end-users, I can’t say. It’s their call at that point. As I try not to use GPL-license work in my own stuff, that’s not a personal concern.

If it impacts you, it impacts your users. Next to that it impacts any hacker you collaborate with.

And you write it your own: You don’t want to license your code under OSL, or did I read that wrong?

http://ellislab.com/blog/entry/software_license_wrap_up_and_osl_3.0
/thread.

I appreciate the week of license education, and explanation from EllisLabs.  A license FAQ would be great, compiling the important questions asked from the community and answered officially.

Is the OSL 3.0 license compatible with GPL?  No.

The OSL 3.0 says merely having a website online and accessible, is considered distribution.  How do I comply with the requirements to make the CodeIgniter source code publicly available?  Do I then need to indicate my site is powered by CodeIgniter and link to codeigniter.com or other?

I appreciate the week of license education, and explanation from EllisLabs.  A license FAQ would be great, compiling the important questions asked from the community and answered officially.

Is the OSL 3.0 license compatible with GPL?  No.

The OSL 3.0 says merely having a website online and accessible, is considered distribution.  How do I comply with the requirements to make the CodeIgniter source code publicly available?  Do I then need to indicate my site is powered by CodeIgniter and link to codeigniter.com or other?

http://codeigniter.com/license_faq.html

http://codeigniter.com/license_faq.html[/quote]

Thanks.

“If you distribute the result of your changes, you must reciprocally license those changes under OSL 3.0, and make the source readily available to the public.”

The definition of distribute in regards to OSL 3.0, is having a website accessibly by anyone else.  So in what manner do I make the source readily available to the public?  A link?  A download?  An attribution?

I’ve seen you (= Derek Jones) being misleading on this since day one. As you don’t know my code, or code of others, you can not tell everybody that the OSL would not apply to them. Because you don’t know if others are creating derivative works or not.

...

If you want the OSL, you should not hide away the problems this can create but openly and explicitly talk about them. It’s not easy to outline what a derivative work is or not, and this problem will have any of your future users that don’t want to put their code under OSL.

...

You trivialize the complex legal context about derivative works in software because you know that your users don’t want to use OSL for their code.

http://hakre.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/codeigniter-goes-copyleft-with-osl/#comment-2842

Are we all mislead by EllisLab’s simple explanation about OSL?
Or EllisLab simply misunderstands OSL?

At least, OSL has a risk which we must adopt OSL to our own code, I feel.

“If you distribute the result of your changes, you must reciprocally license those changes under OSL 3.0, and make the source readily available to the public.”

The definition of distribute in regards to OSL 3.0, is having a website accessibly by anyone else.  So in what manner do I make the source readily available to the public?  A link?  A download?  An attribution?

That simply means “If you fork CodeIgniter then leave the OSL license where it is”, which you should be doing anyway!

“If you distribute the result of your changes, you must reciprocally license those changes under OSL 3.0, and make the source readily available to the public.”

The definition of distribute in regards to OSL 3.0, is having a website accessibly by anyone else.  So in what manner do I make the source readily available to the public?  A link?  A download?  An attribution?

That simply means “If you fork CodeIgniter then leave the OSL license where it is”, which you should be doing anyway!

Yes, you have to provide a link to modified work, means if you modified CI (under OSL) and run a website with it you will have to provide a download package with your modified sources.

If you are hacking the core of CodeIgniter then you have to provide the hacked core of CodeIgniter, NOT your application folder. This should be done on GitHub anyway so your changes can be tracked by you for simplicity, AND it means the community can potentially benefit from those changes.

As for offering up your website as a download obviously that is not the case.

Derivative Work

The Linux Journal published an article in 2003 that sets some reasonable definitions for derivative works as follows:

  The primary indication of whether a new program is a derivative work is whether the source code of the original program was used, modified, translated or otherwise changed in any way to create the new program. If not, then I would argue that it is not a derivative work.
  The meaning of derivative work will not be broadened to include software created by linking to library programs that were designed and intended to be used as library programs. When a company releases a scientific subroutine library, or a library of objects, for example, people who merely use the library, unmodified, perhaps without even looking at the source code, are not thereby creating derivative works of the library.
  Derivative works are not going to encompass plugins and device drivers that are designed to be linked from off-the-shelf, unmodified, programs. If a GPL-covered program is designed to accept separately designed plugin programs, you don’t create a derivative work by merely running such a plugin under it, even if you have to look at the source code to learn how.
  In most cases we shouldn’t care how the linkage between separate programs was technically done, unless that fact helps determine whether the creators of the programs designed them with some apparent common understanding of what a derivative work would look like. We should consider subtle market-based factors as indicators of intent, such as whether the resulting program is being sold as an “enhanced” version of the original, or whether the original was designed and advertised to be improvable “like a library”.

http://ellislab.com/blog/entry/software_license_wrap_up_and_osl_3.0

Hopefully this assuages some of your concerns?

Because EllisLab doesn’t seem to care about their users’ opinion and their community, our project (100.000 page visits/month, 10.000 downloads/month, ~100.000 current installations) decided to port all code from CodeIgniter to Yii framework.
It is a pity that all this has to be done because of the licensing issues but we will say “goodbye CodeIgniter” now!

Because EllisLab doesn’t seem to care about their users’ opinion and their community, our project (100.000 page visits/month, 10.000 downloads/month, ~100.000 current installations) decided to port all code from CodeIgniter to Yii framework.
It is a pity that all this has to be done because of the licensing issues but we will say “goodbye CodeIgniter” now!

Good thing 100k pageviews per month is nothing then, lol.
Last time I checked my codeigniter powered site had 700-800k pageviews per week, but hey, I don’t go make a stupid fuss about it because the license isn’t a problem.

Because EllisLab doesn’t seem to care about their users’ opinion and their community, our project (100.000 page visits/month, 10.000 downloads/month, ~100.000 current installations) decided to port all code from CodeIgniter to Yii framework.
It is a pity that all this has to be done because of the licensing issues but we will say “goodbye CodeIgniter” now!

There is the same opinion below page:

Obviously EllisLab only cares only about their own IP (how legal that is could be discussed because no past contributor was asked about the license change) not about their community or other open Source projects (they weren’t even aware of Derek Allards project) based on CI.
http://www.limesurvey.org/en/component/content/article/1-general-news/228-withdrawing-20a-and-the-reasons-behind-it

It is a very sad story.
Wish that EllisLab could hear from others.

narcisha, do you think it’s worth differentiating between a CodeIgniter powered site and a project which offers a CodeIgniter based application for download? Think about it 😊

Because EllisLab doesn’t seem to care about their users’ opinion and their community, our project (100.000 page visits/month, 10.000 downloads/month, ~100.000 current installations) decided to port all code from CodeIgniter to Yii framework.
It is a pity that all this has to be done because of the licensing issues but we will say “goodbye CodeIgniter” now!

Nobody has explained a useful factual reason as to why. I hear a lot of people saying its a bad thing, panicking and spreading rumours about what OSL does and doesn’t mean, but seriously its not an issue!

GPL is not the be-all and end all of licensing. Hell PHP itself is not GPL BECAUSE of the same reasons CodeIgniter is not.

GPL enforces many restrictions on what can and cannot be done with the licensed code. The PHP developers decided to release PHP under a much more loose license (Apache-style), to help PHP become as popular as possible.

CodeIgniter might not have picked the Apache license but they’ve explained the reasoning for that in detail.

Why on earth would you recode your entire codebase because of a license change that doesn’t really change anything other than making the system/ folder be better protected against people copying it and putting it under a different name.

It boils down to:

- If you fork CodeIgniter, keep the license in there
- If you modify CodeIgniter, publish the changes (GitHub does this all for you)
- If you want to sell something on top of CodeIgniter then crack on, only the OSL folder is licensed and you can do whatever you want with the rest.

GPL is not “the savior of the internet”, it is a weird restrictive license that The PHP Group and Zend themselves do not like, so why give EllisLab so much hassle for not picking it either?

I’ve said it plenty of times: I make a living from CodeIgniter and I am not scared of this change at all - you shouldn’t be either.

Why on earth would you recode your entire codebase because of a license change that doesn’t really change anything other than making the system/ folder be better protected against people copying it and putting it under a different name.

Because our open source project LimeSurvey was/is on GPL and we are not screwing our past contributors (like EllisLab does) and just change the code to an incompatible license - that’s why.

If you are so comfortable with the OSL why not also change FuelPHP to OSL, aren’t you a main developer of that framework?

Anyway, the Yii framework has everything that we need, is similar to CI so the port progresses quicker than expected, and it has a great license (Revised BSD). So it is not forcing copyleft like the OSL on CI.