Our VP of engineering and long time geek / hacker sent this to some of the GFS lists. I thought I'd pass it on to you all. ----- Forwarded message from "Michael J. Declerck" <declerck at sistina.com> ----- From: "Michael J. Declerck" <declerck at sistina.com> Message-Id: <20010901223846.7A20B32608 at spook> Date: Sat, 01 Sep 2001 15:38:46 -0700 Reply-To: gfs-devel at sistina.com To: gfs-announce at sistina.com, gfs-users at sistina.com, gfs-devel at sistina.com Subject: [gfs-devel] An explanation of the license change for GFS 4.2 X-Mailer: exmh version 2.5 07/13/2001 with nmh-1.0.4 This is an attempt to explain why Sistina Software Inc changed its license on the GFS product. I hope it dispels some of the confusion surrounding this change and reassures the community of Sistina's commitment to supporting open source in a manner that insures the survivability of both entities. Sistina Software was founded by Matt O'Keefe (Founder and CTO) while he was a professor at the University of Minnesota. The genesis for the formation of Sistina was driven by the following: o GFS was a software project that had demonstrated applicability to a wide range of applications/problems outside the area it was originally written to address - Parallel Ocean simulation/modeling. o The GFS team was tightly integrated group that believed in the product and the benefits that it could bring to the open source and commercial communities. o Funding for GFS in the academic environment dwindled to near zero due to budgetary constraints in its primary funding agencies. These factors all came together to bring about the founding of Sistina in January 2000. At that point, Sistina's business model was to provide storage management tools and expertise to the open source community through two products: o GFS o LVM and to offer management tools and support contracts for those products to generate revenue for the business. This revenue would be utilized to continue development of GFS and LVM, as well as, grow Sistina. For the entire first year Sistina focused on bringing GFS out of the academic environment and providing it with the features and robustness necessary to survive in enterprise environments. During that period we aggressively pursued support contracts for GFS or partners that wanted to work with either embedding or productizing GFS. We were able to secure some contracts during that period. They were small and did not provide enough strategic linkage with others to support the level of development that Sistina was pursuing. At the same time we were actively recruiting talent to work with Heinz Mauelshagen (original author Linux LVM) to accelerate the development of LVM. Sistina was able to recruit two additional people to work with Heinz on the LVM. This team was also able to secure some small contracts of limited scope. In January of 2001 Sistina released the first "production" release of GFS and tagged it with a 4.0 version number. This was built on the three prior releases from the work at the University of Minnesota and brought GFS to a point where Sistina could actively pursue having its technology embedded in devices or IT infrastructures. The LVM team was also getting ready to release LVM 1.0 when it was adopted as part of the base kernel in the Linux 2.4 release. Everything was looking quite good from our standpoint. We had reasonable products with a wealth of interest in them. We kept working on both products after January while actively pursuing support contracts for them and developing GUI based tools to support them. From January to June we talked to a number of people who were either currently using our products, embedding our products, or looking at using our products about supporting Sistina in some manner. Although there were potential opportunities none of them came fruition. It seemed that we were just doing too good a job of supporting our product. People didn't seem to see any value in paying for good support and ensuring the viability of the products when they were already receiving good support for free and lots of others seemed to be interested in them. It was at this point that we began noticing that people were actively reselling either GFS or LVM without providing anything back to Sistina. It seemed unfair that others where generating revenue off of our products but were unwilling to provide some of that revenue back to us, thereby ensuring Sistina's and our products longevity and viability. After a fairly lengthy period of internal debate we decided that it was becoming necessary for us to change the license of GFS to eliminate people from taking advantage of Sistina's work without giving something back to the entity that developed the code. We did not make this decision lightly. In the end, the adoption of the Sistina Public License (SPL) was viewed as the logical path forward. Our intent with the license is to insure that entities that distribute, embed, or productize GFS to generate revenue have to pay a fee to Sistina for their use of GFS. If an entity is not generating revenue from GFS they can continue to use it under the SPL. Examples of this would be individuals for personal use, universities do research or commercial entities that were using GFS internally but not providing a paying service on top of it. In our minds this allowed the average user to keep using it for free. We also distribute GFS in source form so that people can still modify it for their own use and fix bugs. It also allows valuable peer view which we welcome at any time. We did put a restriction on modification redistribution though. The major reasoning behind this is that we are trying to establish GFS as a standard and didn't want there to be incompatible code forks with regards to things like on-disk meta-data formats. If it was a GFS filesystem it should be usable by any GFS implementation. We are definitely open to accepting patches and advancements to GFS but we do require that the copyright be signed over to Sistina. This is necessary so that we can maintain the copyright on the code. In cases where people are making significant contributions to the code Sistina is willing to provide monetary compensation for their copyright. In this manner people can contribute to the code without being taken advantage of and Sistina can insure that GFS is maintainable and supportable by its staff. I hope this addresses some of the questions and concerns that have arisen over that last couple of days and apologize for the delayed response. Many of us were at Linux World Expo till yesterday evening and this is the first opportunity we have had to respond. Please believe me when I say that Sistina Software is committed to the open source community and working with it. I would appreciate feedback on the SPL license and suggestions on how we can make it better for both Sistina and the open source community as a whole. --- Michael Declerck, declerck at sistina.com +1.510.823.7991 ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Ben Lutgens Sistina Software Inc. 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